Zuckerberg’s face time with Coack K, Williams a slam dunk

Mark Zuckerberg’s whirlwind tour of North Carolina took him to N.C. A&T for a town hall with students then on to personal face time with Roy Williams, Mike Krzyzewski and their basketball teams on Monday. It’s part of his “are we building the world we all want” tour. And he likes what he heard in our state.

“In all seriousness, I’m interested in how sports form the basis for communities,” the multi-billionaire 50 times over wrote in a blog post at his Facebook page.

“We all need to be part of something bigger than ourselves – whether that’s a team or a community that roots for a team.”

He opened with a tease about getting advice from Williams and Coach K for his NCAA tournament bracket but then mixed serious with light-hearted comments.

“Thanks to Coach K and Coach Williams for teaching me how you set values for your organizations – from making sure everyone feels ownership of the team to making sure the team feels like a family,” Zuckerberg added.

“As Coach K said, the players each ‘need to have the courage to lead at the moment leadership is needed.’

Zuckerberg also spent nearly an hour talking with students at A&T, noting that the Monday trip was his first visit to North Carolina. He stressed building communities in that meetup as well.

In his post, Zuckerberg expressed “thanks to the student athletes who shared with me their experiences of how important trust and communication between the players is. They each gave examples of how they made mistakes and needed to work hard at not losing confidence in themselves and their teammates so they could keep performing at peak levels in competitive situations. It reminded me of how important trust and teamwork is at Facebook.”

By the way, Zuckerberg also said he’s not running for political office.

“I think each person should do the things that they’re best suited to do,”he said, according to the Greensboro News & Record. “For me, running Facebook is a really big responsibility and an opportunity to make an impact on a lot of the things we all care about.”

50-state tour

A visit to N.C. is part of a mission to visit all 50 states and follows up on a massive manifesto he published in January about

“History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers – from tribes to cities to nations. At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn’t on our own,” he wrote.

“Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global – like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses – like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.

“This is especially important right now.”

He returned over and over to the community theme, stressing its importance to Facebook as a company.

“In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us,” he wrote, the sentence stressed in bold face.

“For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community – for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

Such a worthy goal. Hopefully visits like the one to our state will further inspire him and his company to reach it.

More coverage online

You can read the Zuckerberg blog about his visit at: