Zuckerberg is no Ballmer

Last week Guy Kawaski interviewed Steve Ballmer (Microsoft) at Mix08. On Saturday, Sarah Lacy interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) at SXSW.

In both interviews the interviewer was chatty, spoke about their own relationship with the interviewee, rambled a few times, asked some easy questions, asked some hard questions, and generally did a good job. Both interviews were about 60 minutes long and both ended with a short Q&A from the audience.

Sarah was vilified (and here, here, and here). Guy was praised (and here).

Was the reaction to Sarah unfair? Undoubtably. Was it sexist? Probably...at least a bit.  But it mostly comes from imaturity...Mark's.

Mark Zuckerberg did not treat it as an interview. He was the guest, but he was disrepectful to his host the entire time. He kept looking away from Sarah to address the audience directly for long periods of time (often spouting inane platitudes). Steve spoke to Guy answering his questions without sounding like he was giving a speach.

Mark gave Sarah blank stares and repeatedly made comments to undermine Sarah's role. Steve stayed 100% engaged and never said anything to undermine Guy.

After the show Sarah was supportive of Mark, and wrote off the audience reaction to an impedence mismatch between the technical nature of the SXSW conference and the high level nature of interviewing a CEO. That's kind of her, but the Guy/Ballmer interview was in exactly the same conditions.

I have 2 pieces of advice for Sarah:

1. Interview an adult next time.
2. Take a play from Guy's playbook and establish the host/guest relationship right away (about 2 minutes into the interview Guy tells Steve that if the interview goes well he will invite Steve back to the next Mix conference).

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