Can you please provide some facts about his previous "douchebag" personality?
I am not trying to put you on the spot here. It is the second time I come across this sort of statement about Mark and I would like to know other people's experience.
A story relayed to me by a colleague goes something like this:
He and his group went to Facebook about a year ago to seek out a relationship, spent weeks setting up the meeting. The day came, they finally arrived, sat around in the conference room with some of the other FB execs (sans Mark). About 20 minutes after the meeting was to start, Mark walks into the room, looks around at everybody there for a few seconds says a flat "No" then walks out of the room.
The FB execs then jumped in to handle the situation and actually get down to negotiating the deal with lots of utterances of "he's just like that" and "he didn't mean anything by that" and then handled all the business stuff you would expect to happen at a high level meeting like that.
Personally I don't think he sounds that arrogant; the only thing that stands out is the question/answer "What was your pitch?" "Oh... we didn't do one."
Can someone find examples of Zuckerberg in 2006/2007 for us to compare?
This was one that I particularly thought was a little bit of him reading his own press a bit too much:
“the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing anew advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. 3 pieces: build pages for advertisers, a new kind of ad system to spread the messages virally, and gain insights.
...
Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections."
I actually just got out of an advertising class (like, literally 3 minutes ago), and we discussed this. It's dead on. Television advertising is in many ways the exact same as radio advertising: New techniques have been developed, but the philosophy behind it remains the same. Internet advertising is a much, much different beast.
Kudos to a nerd who learned how to hack his personality and become a positive PR force instead of a negative one.
He also had some very interesting stuff to say about Facebook. ;)