Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn't enjoyed seeing his company's stock get pummeled on Wall Street this summer, but he is relishing the opportunity to prove his critics wrong.
``I would rather be in a cycle where people underestimate us because I'd rather be underestimated,'' Zuckerberg said Tuesday. ``I think it gives us the latitude to go out and make some big bets.''
Zuckerberg, 28, made his remarks before a standing-room-only audience at a tech conference in San Francisco in his first interview since Facebook Inc.'s rocky initial public offering in May.
The social networking leader's stock has lost nearly half its value since the IPO. More than $50 billion has been lopped off Facebook's market value as the company's shares have fallen from $38 to Tuesday's closing price of $19.43.
No one has lost as much as Zuckerberg, who has seen the value of his Facebook holdings fall about more than $9 billion. That while hearing more skeptics second-guess his ability to lead the company that he founded eight years ago in his Harvard University dorm room.
Since speaking during Facebook's first earnings conference call as a public company nearly seven weeks ago, Zuckerberg has remained largely out of the spotlight.
Wearing a gray T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, Zuckerberg looked at ease through his half-hour appearance. He smiled frequently and even chuckled a few times before a San Francisco audience composed largely of fellow geeks who, like him, tend to enjoy talking about computer coding and building cool products instead of discussing revenue growth and business strategies.
Yet Zuckerberg clearly was aiming many of his remarks at investors. He emphasized that Facebook cared about making money as well as pursuing his mission to make the world a ``more open and connected place.'' He also repeated his belief that the company would figure out numerous ways to profit from the growing number of its 955 million worldwide users who visit is online hangout through mobile applications instead of Web browsers on desktop computers.
Zuckerberg said the performance of Facebook's stock ``has obviously been disappointing,'' and will probably cause some demoralized employees to defect. But he said he hopes most workers will stay and ``double down'' on Facebook's future.
``I think it is really easy to for folks to underestimate how really fundamentally good mobile is for us,'' Zuckerberg told his interviewer, former blogger turned venture capitalist Michal Arrington, at the TechCrunchDisrupt conference.
Zuckerberg shouldered some of the blame for the misperceptions about Facebook's mobile prospects, saying he made a mistake by initially relying on a computer coding called HTML 5 so the company's applications could run on a multitude of different mobile operating systems without making a lot of changes. That resulted in sub-par experiences for many users, Zuckerberg acknowledged, prompting Facebook to use more customization tools to account for the differences in the software that run different devices such as the iPhone and Android phones.
