Mark Zuckerberg

I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

We’re very focused on making News Feed really good, making our photos experience really good, making messaging really good, and creating great location apps. That’s the nature of a platform business of our scale. Most companies that are relevant to us will have some overlaps in some competitive way.

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.

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.

Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn’t smooth. You’ll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don’t believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don’t give up.

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.

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.

If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.

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

Mobile is a lot closer to TV than it is to desktop.

I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.

The question isn’t, ‘What do we want to know about people?’, It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?’

It’s against all of our policies for an application to ever share information with advertisers.

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.

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.

I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person. It’s a pretty good test.

For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

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.

It wasn’t until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.