Mark Zuckerberg

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.

Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we’re continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we’ve taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

Hackathons are these things where just all of the Facebook engineers get together and stay up all night building things. And, I mean, usually at these hackathons, I code too, just alongside everyone.

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.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

If you grew up, and you never had a computer, and you’ve never used the Internet, and someone asked you if you wanted to buy a data plan, your response would be ‘What’s a data plan, and why would I want to use this?’

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

The connectivity declaration is about uniting the whole industry – a lot of companies that typically compete very fiercely – to push in a coherent direction.

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

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.

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

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.

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.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

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.

I think what we’ve found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about, they tend to be more engaging. I think that we’re really going to see this huge shift where a lot of industry is and products are just going to be remade to be social.

Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience.

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school – my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.

The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions… If people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.

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.