Mark Zuckerberg

People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.

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.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

We have these services that people love and that are drivers of data usage… and we want to work this out, so that way, it’s a profitable model for our partners.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

We are a mission-driven company. In order to do this, we have to build a great team. And in order to do that, you need people to know they can make a bunch of money. So we need a business model to make a lot of money.

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 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.

The amount of trust and bandwidth that you build up working with someone for five, seven, 10 years? It’s just awesome. I care about openness and connectedness in a global sense.

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.

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.

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

I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.

Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn’t do with anything else, we just have to do it.

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.

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.