Mark Zuckerberg

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 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.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

We pay attention to every demographic in every country, so we’re going to focus on building things that teens are going to like, and we’re also going to focus on building things that other folks are going to like.

We help Chinese companies grow their customers abroad. They use Facebook ads to find more customers. For example, Lenovo used Facebook ads to sell its new phone. In China, I also see economic growth. We admire it.

We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones – apart from the iPhone – can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into ‘Facebook phones.’ That’s what Facebook Home is.

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.

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.

Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don’t do that by having a service people pay for.

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.

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.

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. 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.

Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know – not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that’s kind of different from the information you put in your profile.

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.

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

Our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be cross all of them.

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.

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.

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.