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.
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.
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.
I remember flying in, driving down 101 in a cab, and passing by all these tech companies like Yahoo! I remember thinking, ‘Maybe someday we’ll build a company. This probably isn’t it, but one day we will.’
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 different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.
The main Facebook usage is so big. About 20 percent of the time people spend on their phone is on Facebook.
If you grew up, and you never had a computer, and you’ve never used the Internet, and someone asked you if you wanted to buy a data plan, your response would be ‘What’s a data plan, and why would I want to use this?’
The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.
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.
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.
I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.
I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
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.
We started off as this platform inside Facebook; and we were pretty clear from the beginning that that wasn’t where it was going to end up. A lot of people saw it and asked, ‘Why is Facebook trying to get all these applications inside Facebook when the web is clearly the platform?’ And we actually agreed with that.
I actually don’t read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.
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.
The majority of people who don’t have Internet, don’t have the Internet because they don’t know why they want to use the Internet.
Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
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