Mark Zuckerberg

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.

We know that for every 1 person who get access to the Internet, one new job gets created, and one person gets lifted out of poverty. So in theory, going and connecting everyone on the Internet is a large national and even global priority.

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.

No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

Connectivity is a human right.

This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook’s a free service. It’s free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.

Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we’re continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we’ve taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing 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.

Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn’t really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn’t until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

We help Chinese companies grow their customers abroad. They use Facebook ads to find more customers. For example, Lenovo used Facebook ads to sell its new phone. In China, I also see economic growth. We admire it.

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.

I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that’s true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.

We’re running the company to serve more people.

Tweeting and social media – that is a powerful weapon that we just hand over to little kids. You know, a ten-year-old. Yo, tell it like it is. And it’s like, no you don’t. You need to think and spell it right and have good grammar.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

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.

My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.

We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don’t check in code anymore.