Connectivity is a human right.
The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.
A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: ‘If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?’
There are definitely elements of experience and stuff that someone who’s my age wouldn’t have. But there are also things that I can do that other people wouldn’t necessarily be able to.
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.
It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.
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.
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.
It’s a juicy thing to say we’re building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us.
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.
Video is growing very quickly on Facebook. A lot of people compare that to YouTube. I think that kind of makes sense. YouTube isn’t the only video service, but I think it’s the biggest, and it probably makes more sense to compare Facebook video to YouTube rather than Netflix because that’s a completely different kind of content.
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.
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.
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.
What really motivates people at Facebook is building something that’s worthwhile, that they’re going to be proud to show to friends and family.
