Mark Zuckerberg streams through the crowd at the Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco like a politician working a pancake breakfast.
As the Facebook CEO makes the rounds at f8, the company’s daylong developer conference, it is clear that he is among his people. Fifteen hundred hackers have amassed, the first time Zuck has called this flock together in two and a half years. They’re here to attend engineering sessions about how to build, grow, and monetize their apps; to munch on plastic-wrapped sandwiches trucked up from Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters; and to try to catch a glimpse of Zuck casually hanging out by the Oculus Rift demo, a sight even more surreal for them than the virtual-reality experience itself. Despite the stuffy heat–the 125,000-square-foot space doesn’t have air-conditioning, so Facebook had to import its own ventilation ducts, which hum along the wooden ceilings–Zuck looks cool and relaxed in his T-shirt and jeans. He walks tall, chest out firmly, and with each quick hello he leaves a trail of starstruck smiles and excited whispers in his wake, as if Harry Styles were strolling through a suburban shopping mall. As one beaming attendee says after shaking hands with the CEO, “He seems pretty fucking confident!”
Zuck, now 30 years old, has reason to be confident. His company is crushing it. Monthly active users: up to almost 1.3 billion worldwide. Engagement: up, with more than 50% of users now visiting the service six days a week and, according to a report by the app-analytics firm Flurry, spending 17% of their time on their phones in Facebook’s app, far and away the most popular service on iOS and Android devices. Speaking of mobile, Facebook, which spent all of 2012 and into 2013 dogged by concerns that it would not be able to make money on people’s phones, now generates 59% of its ad revenue from mobile. One particular ad unit–the one that suggests apps a Facebook user might want to download–is the envy of the entire industry and is being widely copied. Revenue for the first quarter of 2014 was $2.5 billion. The company earned profits of $642 million, almost triple its haul a year earlier.
These feats are even more impressive when you consider that Zuck is delivering these results with a core product that has been criticized for being as stagnant as it is ubiquitous, a place where parents and grandparents share photos of kids who may be less likely to embrace the service when they grow up. In a world churning out startups with one innovation after another–Snapchat, Tinder, Whisper–Facebook can seem like yesterday’s news. Yet how many businesses see revenue and engagement surge just as passion for their products stalls?
