Mark Zuckerberg

I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we’d initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally.

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

There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.

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.

Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn’t really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn’t until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.

We know that for every 1 person who get access to the Internet, one new job gets created, and one person gets lifted out of poverty. So in theory, going and connecting everyone on the Internet is a large national and even global priority.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of my big regrets is that Facebook hasn’t had a major chance to shape the mobile operating system ecosystem.

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 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.

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.

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.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

Our role is to be a platform for making all of these apps more social, and it’s kind of an extension of what we see happening on the web, with the exception of mobile, which I think will be even more important than the web in a few years – maybe even sooner.

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

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.