Chris Hughes And Facebook: What Are A Founder’s Responsibilities?

It’s unusual to see the co-founder of a technology company openly campaign through the media and in collaboration with the authorities against the very enterprise they set up and to which they owe their fortune. Chris Hughes was the non-technological co-founder of Facebook, while Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Andrew McCollum worked on the development of the functionalities and technological architecture of the social network, and Eduardo Saverin tried to develop its business and finances. Hughes’ job was to suggest functionalities, to improve usability, to carry out beta tests, and above all, look after external relations during the phase after the company left Harvard’s campus and began taking over the world. Of that group of original co-founders, friends and fellow residents at Harvard, Zuckerberg is now the last man standing.

When co-founders leave a company, it is usually because they no longer share its vision. Hughes left in 2007 to join an exciting political project: Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign, and one where the social networks played a key role. Hughes’ experience at Facebook was essential. Introducing social networks into a campaign strategy was new (the immediate precedent had been Howard Dean in 2004) and was still free of the negative connotations later associated with Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections.

It must have been painful for Hughes to watch as Facebook went from being a social network focused on improving interaction between users, as was reasonable in a project initially intended to work within university campuses, to become a monster with more than two billion users around the world and able to do what it wanted, to make decisions about what users could see or to harass others, manipulate elections and even to facilitate genocide in Myanmar. Even if a company has made you immensely rich and has changed your life, watching as it becomes a force for wrongdoing is painful, particularly after he supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Chris Hughes, who dedicated his time and energy to nurturing Facebook, has been able to watch from close up how it became a threat not only to the projects he worked on, but for democracy and society.

We all know how it got there: over the past few years, Facebook has not only consolidated its power base but has acquired or copied any challenge. Other technology companies have done the same, to the point of raising concerns about unfair competition and monopoly practices. But nobody has done it with the same cutthroat spirit as Zuckerberg, who understands better than anybody else in his industry the importance of avoiding what Clayton Christensen has dubbed the innovator’s dilemma: disrupt yourself before your competitors’ do.

Chris Hughes now presents legislators with an interesting opportunity: he’s been out of the company for more than 12 years, but he understands what it was at the time and what it has become, and witnesses are needed to understand that evolution. Hughes understands the problem of sorcerer’s apprentices like Zuckerberg, capable of blending the right ingredients to obtain a source of power that has now escaped his control: a tool that has come to characterize the connective tissue of our society in the hands an irresponsible man with an omnipotent power but with no more experience than the position he occupies and who has never had to answer to anyone and who has never learned from anyone other than his own very limited experience. What could possibly go wrong?

The founders and co-founders of technology companies with proven ability to change the world have a responsibility that goes beyond maximizing the shareholder profit. They have to be aware of the moral dilemmas they are capable of generating. But while Chris Hughes understand this, Mark Zuckerberg clearly doesn’t. His is not a betrayal, but a conscious apostasy. He has learned, in addition, over the course of a career with many highs and many lows, how these things should be learned. If Hughes, like others who helped make Facebook a success, believes that it is essential to split the company up and put it under control, no doubt he has good reasons for doing so. It would be a very good idea to study these reasons carefully and take them into consideration for the future.