The Kiwi who founded Facebook Marketplace - and worked alongside Mark Zuckerberg - has some salient messages for New Zealand businesses, and an optimistic outlook for this country’s start-up sector.
A famous sign at Facebook’s headquarters at Silicon Valley in California harbours a hidden, rusty reminder that things can go awry in the tech industry - and business, more generally - very quickly.
Bowen Pan relates how the sign at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park - once carrying the Facebook thumbs-up sign and now with the Meta company logo - has, decaying away behind it, the old sign for Sun Microsystems, a once high-flying but eventually ill-fated computer hardware, software and IT firm.
Pan, who has returned to New Zealand after 13 years in the US, including more than six years at Facebook, says the “K curve” of competitiveness - where one company will prosper and another can collapse - can come “very fast” in the tech industry. Complacency can be a killer.
“Tech companies are trained from birth to never be complacent because if you are complacent, you die,” Pan tells the Media Insider podcast this week.
“Those who do become complacent are no longer here, right? This is ingrained so deeply in the ethos of Silicon Valley, you can actually see this literally in the physical environment.”
Facebook’s campus now occupies the property where Sun Microsystems was once based.
“A little story that people may not know is that if you go to the Facebook campus... if you peer behind that logo, it’s actually the Sun Microsystems logo,” says Pan. “It’s still there. We just flipped it, and it’s rusting away.
“It’s a constant daily reminder, purposely there that this amazing campus - this thing that seems unmovable around us - can be gone in an instant if you become arrogant and you do not evolve and you do not move really quickly, [if you] do not disrupt yourself, and be willing to take risks.”
As Herald business writer Chris Keall wrote last month, Pan - then aged just 28 - convinced Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to launch Marketplace – one of the biggest moves in the social network’s history.
Pan talks on today’s podcast about the genesis of Marketplace, and how the idea stemmed from Facebook users’ behaviour in Indonesia, where he found that customers were using the social media site to buy and sell items, even though it had no specialised platform for such transactions.
It’s a salient lesson, he says, for all businesses to consider their customers’ behaviour.
“You can kind of strategise all you want, and have a vision of where you want to go, but ultimately... it’s shaped by what people do. It’s shaped by user behaviour.”
As Keall wrote last month of Pan: “Now, after a successful and high-profile stint in the heart of Silicon Valley, the entrepreneur – now 39 – has returned home to raise his young family in New Zealand and use his tech skills to help local start-ups".
Pan has joined the NZME board - one of three new directors following an overhaul at the top table of the media firm, which owns the NZ Herald, Newstalk ZB and a suite of other media brands.
He will be a critical figure as the company seeks to accelerate the growth of property platform OneRoof, and perhaps move more forcefully into other digital classified areas, including motoring.
He will bring a tech and entrepreneurial ethos to an industry whose fortunes have been massively impacted by the global giants. New Zealand media companies have been appealing to successive Governments for several years to even the regulatory playing field.
While Pan says that regulation is not “unimportant”, it’s clear he believes media companies need to focus on their own customers’ experiences and behaviour, by considering themselves digital audience platforms - with their own ability to shape their future success.
Pan also speaks today about the ingredients now in place for the New Zealand start-up sector to attract some of the best overseas talent. And no longer, he says, do our best brains need to go offshore, with numerous, successful Kiwi-led ventures redefining global industries.
As he recently told budding entrepreneurs in a presentation at Auckland University’s Business School: “You don’t have to go big or go home, you can go big and stay home … so you don’t have to leave to start changing the world. You just have to aim higher.”
In today’s podcast, Pan - who immigrated to New Zealand from China when he was just 9, without knowing a word of English - describes the working environment at Facebook alongside Zuckerberg, whom he praises as an extraordinary tech leader and one of the few leading survivors over more than two decades.
“If you look across all the tech giants today, Zuck is the only one left, who is still a founder who is operating the company like a founder, right? If you read a lot of commentary in the Valley, actually that’s very rare.”
Hear more from Pan about his return to New Zealand - and his excitement and message for the country’s business and start-up communities - in today’s podcast.
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.
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