Mark Zuckerberg

We have a very open culture at the company, where we foster a lot of interaction between not just me and people but between everyone else. It’s an open floor plan. People have these desks where no one really has an office. I mean, I have a room where I meet with people. But it has all glass, so everyone can see into it and see what’s going on.

People love photos. Photos originally weren’t that big a part of the idea for Facebook, but we just found that people really like them, so we built out this functionality.

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know – not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that’s kind of different from the information you put in your profile.

We’ve built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it’s really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that’s what’s so amazing about the scale that it’s at today.

Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know – not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that’s kind of different from the information you put in your profile.

My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.

A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it’s the most ridiculous concept.

Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn’t do with anything else, we just have to do it.

We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere – a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer – can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the Internet.

What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that’s a problem that’s probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that’s actually within the range of affordability.

Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience.

We are a mission-driven company. In order to do this, we have to build a great team. And in order to do that, you need people to know they can make a bunch of money. So we need a business model to make a lot of money.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

The amount of trust and bandwidth that you build up working with someone for five, seven, 10 years? It’s just awesome. I care about openness and connectedness in a global sense.