Connectivity is a human right.
You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.
One of the things that we’re trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren’t all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.
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.
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.
There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.
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 think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we’d initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally.
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.
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.
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.
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.
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.
When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.
Facebook and Instagram are both really popular with teens, both in the U.S. and globally across the world. I think what you’re starting to see is that there are all these different ways that people want to share and communicate.
By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.
Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories… We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that’s out there.
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 question isn’t, ‘What do we want to know about people?’, It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?’
Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience.
If we’re trying to build a world-class News Feed and a world-class messaging product and a world-class search product and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality and build drones, I can’t write every line of code. I can’t write any lines of code.
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.
