- Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook because he wanted to understand people and how they work.
- He started by creating tools that allowed people to express themselves and understand others.
- Facebook grew quickly, with 2/3 of Harvard students using it within a few weeks.
- Zuckerberg advises starting with a problem to solve, rather than just wanting to build a company.
- He talks about a low point when Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for a billion dollars, but he and his co-founder decided to keep going.
- The decision led to tension and many people leaving the company.
- Zuckerberg believes in betting on something and making hard decisions, even if the outcome is uncertain for years.
- He has not thought about selling the company again since then.
- Zuckerberg discusses how Facebook has been successful in figuring out what to build and maintaining a culture of innovation.

- Building a company focused on learning quickly is key to success
- Facebook empowers individual engineers to try out ideas and run experiments
- The company uses data and qualitative feedback to solve problems and make decisions
- The growth group at Facebook played a big role in the company's growth rate
- Facebook values hiring talented individuals over experience
- The company provides opportunities for growth and advancement within the organization
- Facebook's 10-year roadmap focuses on connectivity and getting everyone on the internet.

- Connecting everyone is important and beneficial for people worldwide
- AI has the potential to unlock numerous possibilities in various domains, including healthcare and self-driving cars
- AI can save lives and push society forward, despite fears of negative impacts
- Virtual reality and augmented reality will be the next major computing platform, allowing for more creativity and immersive experiences
- Entrepreneurs should choose something they care about and work on it before committing to turning it into a company
- Facebook became a formal company about six months after starting, despite initial plans to go back to school
- Peter Thiel believed that Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz would not go back to school and was proven right
- The biggest risk in a rapidly changing world is not taking any risk at all

- Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook to understand people and their behaviors.
- Facebook quickly gained popularity, with 2/3 of Harvard students using it within weeks.
- Zuckerberg advises starting with a problem to solve rather than just wanting to build a company.
- He made a difficult decision to decline a billion-dollar offer from Yahoo, leading to tension and departures.
- Zuckerberg believes in making hard decisions and betting on uncertain outcomes.
- Facebook values learning quickly and empowers engineers to experiment and innovate.
- The company's 10-year roadmap focuses on connectivity and expanding internet access.
- AI, virtual reality, and augmented reality are seen as transformative technologies.
- Entrepreneurs should work on something they care about before committing to turning it into a company.
- Taking risks is crucial in a rapidly changing world.

Mark is a cofounder of Facebook.

Facebook is one of the most influential companies in the history of the world. Over 1.1 billion people use it every day.

Access podcast and transcript versions of this interview here:
http://www.ycombinator.com/future/mark/

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc)
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:12 The early days of Facebook?
00:02:17 Did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started?
00:03:16 Something that made Facebook different from other projects that you built?
00:04:26 Advice that you give to other people that want to build products?
00:05:37 Hardest parts in the history of Facebook?
00:09:25 Have you thought about selling the company?
00:09:37 How to decide what to build?
00:11:54 What about bigger bets like making a large acquisition or rollout news feed?
00:14:35 Do you recommend companies put in place a growth group?
00:15:52 Impact of growth group on the growth rate of Facebook?
00:16:32 How have you hired your team and what do you look for?
00:17:24 If you don't have the experience how do you assess someone's raw talent?
00:19:05 What are you most excited about over the next 20 years?
00:22:26 I'm 19 today, what should I do to impact the world?
00:23:06 How far into Facebook did it become a company?
00:24:20 What's the best piece of advice Peter gave you?
00:25:24 Outro

Mark, you've built 1 of the most influential companies in the history of the world, so we are especially excited that you are here.

Why don't we start with just the early days of Facebook?

Tell us what it was like when you started it.

So for me, the thing that I was really fascinated by, and always have been, is people, and how people work.

When I was in college, I studied psychology and computer science.

And 1 of the things that you learn when you study psychology is that there are all these parts of the brain which are geared just towards understanding people, right?

Understanding language, how to communicate with each other, understanding facial expressions, emotions, processing.

Yet when I looked out at the internet in 2004, which is when I was getting started, you can find almost anything else that you wanted.

You could find news, movies, music, reference materials.

But the thing that mattered the most to people, which was other people and understanding what's going on with them, just wasn't there.

And I think what was going on was that all that other content was just out there, able to be indexed by search engines and other services.

But in order to understand what's going on with people, you needed to build tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with themselves.

You know, I wanted to figure out what courses to take, so I built this little website course match that just made it so that you could enter what courses you were taking and you could click on them and see who else was in them and it did all these correlations so it told you people who took this course were likely to enjoy this course too.

And The thing that just struck me from the beginning is people would just spend hours clicking through.

Here are the courses that people are taking and wow, isn't it interesting that this person is interested in these things.

There's nothing that was super interesting there.

But that just struck me as people have this deep thirst to understand what's going on with those around them.

other things like that that I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got around to building the first version of Facebook that kind of added a lot of these things together.

Did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started?

I built the first version of Facebook because it's something that my friends and I wanted to use at Harvard, a directory and a way to connect with the other people around us.

And I didn't think at all that it was going to be a company.

I remember very specifically the night that we launched the first version.

I went out to get pizza with a couple of my friends who now work here.

And I remember really clearly, we were talking about how 1 day, we thought that someone was gonna build a community like this for the world, and that that would be some company.

I mean, it just, it wasn't even- It didn't even occur.

Yeah, no, I mean, it wasn't even an option that we considered that it might be us.

I mean we just weren't focused on building a company back then.

We were just building something that we thought would be useful at our school.

So as you look back, is there something that made Facebook different from the other projects that you had built that allowed it to turn into this, the company it is today?

So I mean the others, I mean CourseMatch and just the other different crowdsource tools, they kind of serve their purpose and then we're done.

Whereas with Facebook, there was just such, people loved it and had such an intensity of using it.

I think within a couple of weeks, 2 thirds of students at Harvard were using it.

And all these other students at MIT and other local universities were writing in asking us if we could open up Facebook at their school.

Right, and you know, again, I didn't set out, and my roommates didn't set out to build a service that we were gonna turn into a company, but we just kind of followed what people wanted, and that led us to expand it to all these other schools, and eventually beyond schools, and to, you know, at some point, once we'd hired a bunch of people, we decided to turn it into a company and go for this mission of connecting the world, but that's not where we started.

As you think about where you did start, is there other advice that comes to mind that you give to other people that want to build products that you can take away from the early days of Facebook?

You know, I always think that you should start with the problem that you're trying to solve in the world and not start with deciding that you want to build a company.

Right, and the best companies that get built are things that are trying to drive some kind of social change, even if it's just local in 1 place, more than starting out because you want to make a bunch of money or have a lot of people working for you or build some company in some way.

So, you know, I always think that this is kind of a perverse thing about Silicon Valley in a way.

Which is that, you know, people decide often that they want to start a company before they even decide what they want to do.

And that just feels really backwards to me.

And, you know, for anyone who's had the experience of actually building a company, you know that you go through some really hard things along the way.

And I think part of what gets you through that is believing in what you're doing and knowing that what you're doing is really delivering a lot of value for people.

And that's, I think, how the best companies end up getting made.

I want to talk for a second about low points, because I think people never appreciate how bad they really are.

And I think it's always reassuring to hear that even Mark Zuckerberg went through some serious low points and came out okay.

So can you tell us about some of the hardest parts in the early history of Facebook?

Yeah, I think 1 of the hardest parts for me was actually when Yahoo offered to buy the company for a lot of money.

Because up until that point, that was the turning point in the company, where before that, every day we'd just come in and do what we thought was the right next thing to do.

We'd open to more schools, we'd open to high school, and open beyond schools, and launch more photos, because that's what seemed like the next thing that we needed to do to help people express themselves and understand more of what was going on around them.

But then, Yahoo came in with this really meaningful offer, a billion dollars for...

was a couple of years in right and you know we had 10 million people using the product at the time right so it wasn't like it wasn't as if it were obvious that we were going to succeed far beyond that.

And that was the first point where we really had to look at the future and say, wow, is what we're going to build going to actually be so much more meaningful for this.

And that caused a lot of interesting conversations in the company and with our investors.

And at the end of that, Dustin and I just decided, no, we think that we can actually go connect more than just the 10 million people who are in schools.

We can go beyond that and have this really be a successful thing.

And we just had to go for it, but that was really stressful because a lot of people really thought that we should sell the company.

And for a lot of folks who joined a startup, I feel like at that point I hadn't been very good about communicating that we were trying to go for this mission.

We just showed up every day and just kind of did what we thought was the right next thing to do.

So for a lot of the folks who joined early on, they weren't really aligned with me.

For them, they joined And being able to sell a company for a billion dollars after a couple years, that was like a home run.

But I think that the fact that I didn't communicate very well about what we were trying to do caused this huge tension.

And the part that was painful wasn't turning down the offer.

It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit, because they didn't believe in what we were doing.

Right, I mean, if you look at the management team that we had-

The whole management team was gone within about a year after that.

Did you ever regret that decision in that period?

Like were there times where you were like, well, we should have sold?

You know, I got really lucky because, you know, not only did what I believed in end up working out, but it ended up working out pretty quickly.

So, literally, I think this was in the summer of

and by, I think the next month after that we launched News Feed, which now 10 years later, looking back at it as 1 of the most used products in the world.

And then we launched the ability for anyone to sign up, which immediately started growing the community.

So within a few months after turning down the offer, I think it was actually pretty clear that was the right decision.

But I think since then, there have been much harder decisions that we've had to make where sometimes you have to bet on something and either bet the direction of the company or bet billions of dollars on something, and it's not going to be clear whether you're right for 5 or 10 years.

And that, I think, actually can end up being much harder than this 1.

But before we go there, have you ever thought about selling the company again since?

people that want to be here for a long time.

Yeah, so I wanna talk about, 1 of the most common questions we get from people building products is how to decide what to build.

How to figure out when to bet the company, how to do something totally new.

And I think 1 thing that Facebook has done incredibly well is figure out what to build and build this repeated innovation culture, which I think is like the hardest thing to do in business.

So how have you done that and how do you advise other people to do the same?

I think the key is building a company which is focused on learning as quickly as possible.

Companies are learning organisms and you can make decisions that either make it so that you learn faster or you learn slower.

And, you know, in a lot of ways building a company is like following the scientific method, right?

You try a bunch of different hypotheses and if you set up the experiments well, then you kind of learn what to do.

And I think that's an important philosophy.

So there are all these different decisions that we make inside the company, you know, everything down to really empowering individual engineers.

We invest in this huge testing framework, right?

At any given point in time there aren't, there's not just 1 version of Facebook running in the world, right?

There's probably tens of thousands of versions running because engineers here have the power to try out an idea and ship it to maybe 10, 000 people or 100, 000 people.

And then they get a readout on how that version of what they did whether it was a change to show better content in newsfeed or UI change or some new feature that they get a readout on how that version performed compared to the baseline version of Facebook that we have on everything that we care about.

How connected people are, how much people are sharing, and how much they say that they're finding meaningful content.

Business metrics like how much revenue we make and engagement of the overall community.

And by running tens of thousands of different experiments and putting the power in people's hands to try all these different things, you can imagine we'd just make so much more progress than we could if every change had to be approved by me, or every idea had to come from management.

So I do think that there's something very deep about building this learning culture and moving quickly towards that that just helps you get ahead over time.

What about the bigger bets like making a large acquisition or the rollout of News Feed or something like that?

So I actually think when you do stuff well, you don't, you shouldn't have to do big crazy things, right?

So you want to actually evolve In a way where you're working with your community and making steps and learning so take newsfeed for example That there was a relatively big shift but it actually had been a couple of years in the making by watching how people were using the service, right?

So, you know, when we started off, we didn't have anything like News Feed that showed you updates from what people were sharing.

And what we found were, originally 1 of the big behaviors was people would just click around, right?

They'd click on different profiles, you know, hundreds of them, just to, and they'd go through all their friends to see what people had changed, right?

To see what the update was in their friend's day.

And we learned from that that people were not just interested in looking up and learning about a person, but also understanding the day-to-day changes.

So first we made this product that just showed in order which of your friends had updated their profile, right?

So that at least told you whose profile to click on.

And then, you know, the first version of News Feed was really simple.

All it did was it basically took the content that people were posting and put it in order on your homepage.

So I think when things are working well, you use data and you use the qualitative feedback that you're getting from listening to how your community is using your product to tell you what problems to go solve.

And then you basically use intuition to figure out what the solutions to those problems might be.

And then you test those hypotheses by rolling them out and getting more data and feedback on that.

And then that gives you a sense of where to go.

You know, when I look at things like, you know, we bought, you know, the Oculus team for a lot of money.

I actually view that as, you know, if we'd done a better job of building up some of the expertise to do some of that stuff internally, then maybe we wouldn't have had to do that.

But, you know, instead we hadn't done that.

And, you know, the Oculus team is by far the most talented team working on that problem.

So it just made sense to go make this big move.

But I actually kind of think as CEO, it's your job to not get into a position where you need to be doing these crazy things.

Over the period of doing stuff, you'll, you know, you can't be ahead of everything.

So it's better to make big moves and be willing to do that than, you know, have pride and not do that and never admit that you could have done something better in the past.

But I think when stuff is working well, you're learning incrementally and growing that way.

Speaking of growing, 1 thing I heard you say years ago is that 1 of the best things Facebook had done was invent the idea of a growth group.

And so this is something now that I've heard a lot of founders ask about.

Could you tell us, is that still something you recommend people running companies put in place and how Facebook's worked in the early days?

So making it so we could grow faster was, I think, the most important product feature that we ended up building for Facebook.

And the traditional approach to growing and marketing is, you know, you have a communications group or you have a marketing team and you buy ads.

sometimes there's a place for that, especially when you're trying to communicate something and get a message out.

But if you're actually trying to grow a product, I think often the best levers for doing that are within the product themselves and getting people in your community who enjoy what you're doing to evangelize that to their friends and getting that to happen as efficiently as possible.

So there's no magic in the growth group that we built that other people can't replicate.

It's just being very rigorous with data, investing in data infrastructure, so that way you can process all these different experiments and learn what people are trying to tell you, and then go invest in engineering and actually try to grow the community because I think that's the most important feature for a lot of networks.

And can you tell how much of an impact that group had on the growth rate of Facebook?

Yeah, I think it's, you know, overall I think it's been very big.

I don't have a number off the top of my head, but I mean, even just looking at some of these specific features that we've built, like people you may know, right?

Which is 1 of the important things, right?

Again, if you're, you know, a social product isn't that useful if you're not connected to other people, 1, you're using it.

So, you know, helping you go from signing up for Facebook to connecting to the people that you care about most is probably 1 of the most important things that we can do.

Another thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring.

And I always tell founders that this is the thing you have to get good at.

So how have you hired your team, and what do you look for when you bring people on?

If you think about it, I started the company when I was 19, right?

So I can't institutionally believe that experience is that important, right?

Or else I would have a hard time reconciling myself, right?

So we invest in people who we think are just really talented, even if they haven't done that thing before.

And that applies to people who are fresh out of university, as well as people like the CFO who took the company public, had not taken a company public before, right?

And a lot of his background was in production, development at Genentech before.

And so if you don't have the experience to look for, how do you assess someone's raw talent?

Well, Often you can tell from different things that they've done.

So it's not that, obviously everyone's done something, even if you're 19, you've done side projects and interesting stuff.

And I think what's important is not to believe that someone has to have specifically done the job that they're going to do in order to be able to do it well.

1 of the things that I think we've done well is just given the people at the company a lot of opportunity.

So, you know, it's not just me who started when I was 19 and now, you know, I'm running this big company.

There were a number of people who joined who were people I did problem sets with at Harvard or they dropped out of Stanford or different programs who have grown with the company over this long period of time.

And 1 of the things that I'm the most proud of is We have about 12 different product groups at the company and all of the people who are running them with the exception of 1 Did not join the company running a product group or reporting to me

And the 1 exception was is David Marcus who was the CEO of a 50 billion dollar public company So, you know, so I'm pretty happy that that that he's on board and having him run a product group I think is a pretty big coup too, but literally none of them started off reporting to me You know, they all start off in different roles.

Some were engineers, some were data analysts, some were product managers, and they've all grown.

But I think what happens is, you know, people see that you create opportunities for people, and that also, I think, keeps the best people engaged and makes the best people want to come work at your company because they feel like, oh, I'm going to get those kind of opportunities too.

What are you most excited about over the next 20 years?

What do you think will be the major transformations?

How do you think the rest of the world will transform?

So we have this 10-year roadmap of 3 of the big changes that we want to see in the world.

Connectivity, so getting everyone in the world on the internet.

Right now, more than half the world is not on the internet, which is, I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley probably take this for granted, the internet, because it just is not uniformly available.

And if we want to solve a lot of the big challenges of the world today, they're not problems that any 1 group of people or even 1 country can solve.

They really involve coming together and giving everyone an opportunity to participate in solving them.

So I think connecting everyone is really a key thing, which is going to be great for people around the world.

I think that that's just gonna unlock so much potential in so many different domains.

And we use it at Facebook for a lot of different things, for showing people content that they're gonna find more meaningful, for making sure that you connect with the people you actually care about on the service.

But in a lot of ways, the work that we're doing on AI to push the fundamental state of the art forward is exactly the same stuff that's going into systems that diagnose diseases better, or find better drugs to treat people, or that other companies are using when they build self-driving cars.

And these are things that are going to save lives.

I heard this story recently at this conference where someone has built a machine learning application where you can take a picture of a lesion on someone's skin and it can detect instantly whether it's skin cancer with the accuracy of the best dermatologists and doctors in the world.

So, you know, I mean, who doesn't want that, right?

I mean, now like you're gonna be able to put the power in your doctor's hand to become the best doctor in the world at that thing.

Everyone will be the best doctor in the world.

And that's a really fundamental thing, right?

That, you know, I get a little bit frustrated, I think, when people fear monger about AI and how it could end up hurting people.

Because I think in many real ways around diseases or driving more safely, this is going to save people's lives and push people forward.

So that's a really big deal, I think, for the next 10 years.

And then the next thing that I always think is going to make a big difference is every 10 or 15 years there's a new major computing platform that comes around that allows people to do completely different things than they could do before.

So 20 years ago, most of us were using desktop computers.

We used them in work because it made our work more productive, but most people didn't use them for fun.

Now we have phones, which help us connect with each other and they're much more human devices, but there's going to be another platform after that.

And I think that's going to be virtual reality and augmented reality.

And that I think is just going to help people be more creative, experience what other people are feeling much more immersively than we even can through video and things like that today.

So I'm really excited about that trend as well.

So you were 19 when you started Facebook.

1 question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, I'm 19 today, I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better.

So how do you advise people who are 19 today and want to impact the world like you have?

You know, I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is Pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working.

And I think that if you look at the data of like the very best companies that have gotten built, I actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not from people who decided up front that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time, a local maximum.

I totally agree and just to make this point, how far into Facebook did it actually become a company?

I think probably, I think it became a formal Delaware company when Peter Thiel invested about 6 months in.

When we were first talking to Peter about raising money, Dustin and I were very clear with him that we were planning on going back to school.

I started Facebook when I was a sophomore We took the summer off or no classes over the summer we were working on it And then you know our stated game plan was to go back to school in the fall and continue working on it Then but not like sit sit in an office and work on it full-time And Peter was just kind of like, all right, sure you are.

Do you think he just believed that you weren't actually going to go back

So I think he would probably say that he knew that we were not going to go back to school or believed that he could talk us out of it.

It was pretty clear that the amount of work was just growing so quickly.

But we actually didn't drop out immediately.

We told Harvard that we were taking 1 semester off.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Mark Zuckerberg : How to Build the Future