When companies prepare to go public, they first go on what's called a road show — a series of visits to potential investors meant to drum up excitement about the stock. CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously kicked off Facebook's road show in 2012 wearing a hoodie and dodging swarms of cameras.
Zuckerberg, whose company is now worth $404 billion, is now in the middle of another kind of road show: a tour through everyday America that will inform his work at Facebook and his philanthropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He wants to visit and meet people in every state, which means this year he needs to swing by about 30 states that he's never been to.
“My work is about connecting the world and giving everyone a voice. I want to personally hear more of those voices this year,” he wrote in January. “It will help me lead the work at Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative so we can make the most positive impact as the world enters an important new period.”
Facebook is arguably the most populist tech company in the world. More than 1.2 billion people use the site every day, and condescending to users can have immediate consequences. After Gizmodo reported that Facebook curators were making choices about what type of news stories its users would see, the company fired its news feed editors and replaced them with an algorithm to better reflect user feedback. That algorithm is a mess, but it's better than creating the impression that Facebook is trying to impose its values on users.
Compare Facebook to companies like Apple, which is still confident enough to believe it knows best when forcing inconvenient changes down its users' throats. While Facebook may still secretly perform social experiments on its massive userbase, it wants to avoid creating the impression that it's anything but a neutral platform upon which everyday Americans can share and connect.
Besides being a source of photo ops, the American road show gives Zuckerberg — a billionaire Harvard dropout with homes in Silicon Valley and Hawaii — a chance to study up on his users in the heartland and the South. Who are they? What are their hopes and dreams? Do they share fake news? Zuckerberg wants to know.
