Mark Zuckerberg

I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world… If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

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 literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we’ve funded ever since by putting ads on the side.

I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.

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

Google’s policy on a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line, but not cross it.

It’s, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we’ve had some very serious ups and downs.

My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person.

I like making things. I don’t like getting my picture taken.

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

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.

I think a lot of the time there isn’t such a black-and-white difference between what’s a platform and what’s an app. It’s really just like the most important apps become platforms.

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

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.

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.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

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.

We’ve built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it’s really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that’s what’s so amazing about the scale that it’s at today.