Mark Zuckerberg

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

There are good examples of companies – Coca-Cola is one – that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

When Facebook was getting started, nothing used real identity – everything was anonymous or pseudonymous – and I thought that real identity should play a bigger part than it did.

It’s, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we’ve had some very serious ups and downs.

The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.

Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.

Our strategy is very horizontal. We’re trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically, we’re trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social, whether it’s on the web or mobile or other devices. So inherently, our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one.

I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges… If I want to get information about you, I just go to TheFacebook, type in your name, and it hopefully pulls up all the information I’d care to know about you.

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.

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

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.

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.

When I started Facebook from my dorm room in 2004, the idea that my roommates and I talked about all the time was a world that was more open.

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

When Facebook was getting started, nothing used real identity – everything was anonymous or pseudonymous – and I thought that real identity should play a bigger part than it did.

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

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.

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.

Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January.

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.