- Mark Zuckerberg discusses the early years of Facebook and his experiences building software
- He talks about his first project called Course Match, which allowed students to see what classes their peers were taking
- He also mentions building a study tool for a class he hadn't attended, which was quickly populated with information from other students
- Zuckerberg highlights the importance of real identity and connections between people on Facebook, which set it apart from competing services
- He emphasizes the need for tools that allow people to share content about themselves comfortably and securely
- He mentions the concept of friending and the importance of the newsfeed feature on Facebook.

- The concept of friending on Facebook was initially popular because it allowed users to showcase their connections and see who other people knew.
- There was less emphasis on real identity in the early days of Facebook, with some communities allowing users to sign up with pseudonyms.
- Using real names can make conversations more civilized, but it can also discourage critical discussions.
- It is important to find a balance between using platforms like Facebook Connect and other options like Twitter or email.
- Mark Zuckerberg reflects on the early days of Facebook and how they were driven by their passion and determination.
- Starting Facebook was challenging, as Zuckerberg had little knowledge about business and made many mistakes along the way.
- Facebook faced more obstacles compared to typical startups, partly because Zuckerberg was young and inexperienced.
- Zuckerberg learned about managing people from those around him and made mistakes due to his lack of knowledge.

The speaker discusses their early conflict with a co-founder over equity division and the importance of vesting schedules. They also talk about the challenges of hiring and managing people, and share their heuristics for hiring good employees. The speaker emphasizes the value of learning from and working with a team, and the importance of creating a company culture that fosters continuous learning. They mention being influenced by Peter Thiel and Sean Parker in terms of strategy and the idea of building a social platform. The speaker also mentions the concept of network effects and the importance of focusing on the few things that truly matter in a growing company.

- The speaker discusses the challenges of balancing different perspectives when surrounded by a team of people.
- They emphasize the importance of focusing on the one thing that matters, which in their case was connecting people quickly and building network effects.
- The speaker mentions a competitor called College Facebook and how they would go into "lockdown" mode whenever the competitor got ahead of them.
- They acknowledge that clones can be a nuisance and that it is important to pay attention to international competitors.
- The speaker expresses their obsession with connecting people and their belief that it is the infrastructure for the world to achieve great things.
- They mention the company's efforts to connect people who cannot afford internet access, even if it may not be profitable in the short term.
- The speaker concludes by stating that Facebook is a subset of their larger movement.

- Mark Zuckerberg discusses the early years of Facebook, including his first projects and the importance of real identity and connections on the platform.
- He emphasizes the need for comfortable and secure tools for sharing content about oneself.
- Zuckerberg reflects on the challenges and mistakes faced in starting and managing Facebook, particularly due to his lack of business knowledge and experience.
- The speaker discusses the importance of vesting schedules, hiring good employees, and creating a company culture that fosters continuous learning.
- They mention being influenced by Peter Thiel and Sean Parker in terms of strategy and building a social platform.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of focusing on the one thing that matters, connecting people quickly and building network effects.
- They acknowledge the presence of competitors and express their obsession with connecting people for the world to achieve great things.
- Facebook's efforts to connect people without internet access are mentioned, even if it may not be profitable in the short term.
- The speaker concludes by stating that Facebook is part of a larger movement.

Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals! https://www.startupschool.org/
Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 
00:00 - Intro
00:49 - What was the first thing you wrote?
08:19 - Why did Facebook win?
12:55 - Network for college students
14:12 - When did you realize you were going to do it?
17:16 - Personal quality
18:25 - Was it rougher than typical startups?
21:12 - Learn to manage people
22:08 - How to find if someone is really good?
24:42 - Managing people
25:45 - Mental model of a startup founder
26:49 - Influence - Peter Thiel and Sean Parker
28:02 - Platform
29:04 - Strategic insights early on
30:28 - How did you get people to friend one another faster?
30:54 - Facebook clones
31:41 - Lockdown
33:55 - Ignore competitors?
34:43 - What did you care too much about?

You know, I came out here earlier and they didn't clap as loud, so it's pretty obvious why they were clapping loud this time.

I just came in a few minutes ago and Jack was here playing a song.

So I wanna, I know it's probably hard to remember what it was like way, way back in the beginnings of Facebook.

But that's where these guys are, in the beginnings.

So I'm going to ask you questions about the early years, right?

Which also have the advantage that you don't have to worry about saying bad things as a public company, because we're just talking about ancient history, right?

So I wonder if you remember when you sat down to write Facebook during that reading period, what was the first thing you wrote?

Like when you had enough code to test something to see if it worked, What was it?

I don't remember then what the first thing was that I wrote, but it actually, the first code for Facebook started way before then, right?

So I, like probably a lot of you guys, I just built a lot of stuff for myself.

All throughout my childhood I built games that I wanted to play, I built a music player that I wanted.

I tried to build stuff that I really wanted for myself.

Right, and I was young, I wasn't building very high quality stuff.

It was just stuff that I wanted, not for anyone else.

And then when I got to college, I started wanting to build products that would let me get insight into the community around me and let me connect with the people around me.

And that had the property that you can't actually just build something that only you use.

If you wanna be able to connect with people around you, you have to start building software that other people are gonna use as well.

Well, before that, it's actually 1 of the, it's that stupid movie makes everyone think that face mash was like was this critical thing?

But But Actually a lot earlier than that in my sophomore year 1 of the first things that I built that was kind of like this Was actually called course match.

I don't think we've talked about this that much in any of these startup schools It was I was trying to figure out what classes I wanted to take my sophomore fall and I wanted to see what other people who had taken the CS classes that I'd taken wanted to take and what my friends were planning on taking and what they'd taken in the past.

But there was no database like that that was out there, so I thought, all right, well how can I do this?

So I went and I wrote this little script that scraped the course catalog and let people put in what classes they wanted and I called it the course graph.

Yeah, I mean it was actually, I made the mistake of running it, running the website from a laptop in my dorm room and My desk was right next to the bathroom when there was constantly steam pouring out of that from people showering, so the laptop actually fried and I lost that 1 after a few weeks of it running.

But that was the first time that I had ever really set up a production, Apache server or MySQL server or a lot of that stuff.

And then a lot of those things, then when I went on to build later stuff, I had those lessons.

And I knew that I could set those things up quickly.

So those were just building blocks on top of which to build future things.

Yeah, no, it was like 1000 or 2000 people out of the really was like 6000 people at Harvard.

People spent so much time just clicking through the links of people to see what classes they were in, and then in the classes they clicked on people who were the roster of the people.

It was just, it was, I thought it was gonna be interesting and I wanted to solve this problem, but it was actually just way more compelling.

And part of my theory at the time was, I looked at all the other types of content that were out there on the internet.

It's like you could search for any music or news or content or reference material that you wanted.

But part of my theory at the time was that people were really missing from the internet.

And that's why I built some of these services that went in that direction.

But I still think people are largely missing from a lot of the software that we build, which is why I'm focused on building this development platform today as part of Facebook.

So that way, the next generation of software that the industry builds can just be more human.

So every app that people build has this sort of additional dimension now, where you can sort of see what other people are doing too.

So you knew by the time you started Facebook that if you made some website, you could get thousands of people to show up to it.

I knew that if I wanted to do this, that I had to build something that would get people to use it.

I didn't know if I could actually do that.

little bit surprising that thousands of people showed up and put their courses on, right?

up for something that wasn't even intended to draw thousands of people, you could probably do it again, right?

And I was really focused on this idea of channeling a community's energy to build some kind of shared asset, whether it's the course graph or ultimately Facebook was a good example of this.

And 1 of my favorite stories from college that I actually, I think I've told at startup school before is, I built the first version of Facebook during reading period, which is basically this 2 or 3 week period that Harvard, I don't know if they still give this, but basically.

Both Microsoft and Facebook started during reading

Yeah, so Harvard likes canceling things that work.

So, the, but So basically it's this period during January before your finals where you can ostensibly study for classes, for your finals.

And I took that period to write the first version of Facebook.

I don't think I'd written any code for that project directly until really January, and then by the end of January, I was basically done with it.

But then 1 day, I woke up a couple of days before this final for this class that I was taking called the Rome of Augustus.

And the class was all about learning the historical significance of a bunch of pieces of art that were there.

And for the final, they were just going to show some pieces of art from the class.

And you had to write an essay on the significance of them.

And I hadn't really gone to class all term.

And then during reading period, when I should have been learning this, I programmed.

There's no way that I was going to cover all this material.

So I just went to the course website, downloaded all the images, and made a little website that basically would randomly show 1 of the images and would let you contribute your notes of what you thought was reasonable, what was important about that photo.

Yeah, that other people learned through hard work.

And then I sent this out to the course email list.

I was like, hey guys, I built a study tool.

And within an hour, the whole thing was just populated with all the information that we needed to take the class, to take the final.

So I think I did pretty well in the final.

Tell us about some real world system you have hacked to your advantage.

That's a question on the YC application form.

We actually ask for people having done a trick like that.

The first couple of times I met Mark, after all this time evaluating startup founders, I can't turn it off.

So I'm like, the first couple times I met Mark, there would be this side process running in my head saying, accept him, accepting him.

And I would have to say, stop it, it's too late.

Well now we get to work together on other things.

So 1 of the things we talked about last year was how when you first launched Facebook, the first other colleges you expanded to were ones that had competing services.

So I didn't ask you at the time, but I wonder now, why did you win?

What was it that Facebook had that the competing services didn't?

I think it was just this focus on real identity and the connections between people.

It goes back to this theme where before Facebook on the internet, you could find a lot of information about a lot of different types of content, but the thing that we as people care the most about, which is other people around us, and our brains are just wired that way, it wasn't there.

And if you think about it, the reason is that, you know, that information about people isn't just out there on the internet to be indexed by some search engine, right?

You can't just send a web crawler around and learn what's going on with people.

You have to build tools that give people the power to share that content themselves.

And if you go back, most of the way that people interacted online was anonymous.

And the idea at the time was that it was pretty scary to put your name and real identity online without the right privacy controls and without the right community infrastructure.

So I think that that's a lot of what we built, was a framework where people would be comfortable sharing in that way.

that's- were people able to share less on these competing services?

I think some of them were just they gave people less ways to express content about themselves.

None of them, I think, had a concept of connections.

So 1 of the things that, if you think about

Yeah, and if you think about friending today, and 1 of the reasons why it's important is because you get the person's content in your newsfeed.

Right, and there was no newsfeed back then, right?

So a lot of the reason that friending was good was just because you could put someone on your profile and say that you were connected to them.

So just like people were more fascinated than intuitively it seemed like they should have been about looking and clicking through the classes that people were taking, a lot of people also just wanted to see who other people knew.

There was nothing like that that existed.

Oh yeah, that was a really critical piece.

they had the nodes of the social graph, but not the arcs?

Well there was that, and I think there was less emphasis on real identity in the community So some of these communities, you know, you just like you you made it so that people could sign up with a pseudonym Which is is fine I mean, I think that there are lots of services that are good with pseudonyms But if you're talking about a real a real community then then you want that.

Have you ever seen the comments on Hacker News?

I think if people were talking under their own names, they might be a bit more civilized.

Well, but sometimes it's actually, it goes both ways, though.

I mean, A lot of the advantage of that is that people can be very critical.

If you're always talking under your real name, there's often a social penalty for being critical.

So it is more civilized, I think, but that may not always be the most productive thing.

Well, we can talk after this about getting Hacker News converted over to Facebook Connect.

The devil you know or the devil you don't.

See, the key is don't only use Facebook Connect.

Some people make the mistake of only using it.

Well, yeah, or Facebook and email or whatever else you want.

So if you hadn't started Facebook, like, For example, if Harvard had already canceled reading period, and you were...

Right, or they kicked you out for FaceMash

FaceMash, you know, you asked this question before about would I have started Facebook without FaceMash.

About the only thing that I got from FaceMash was I met my wife because of it.

Because Harvard said that they were going to kick me out, and my friends really thought that they were going to kick me out, so they planned this going away party for me, and I actually met my wife at that party.

They didn't even wait for the ad board to decide before they had the going away party?

Yeah, my friends were just like completely positive that I was going to get kicked out of school.

Actually, not only that, but my family was pretty confident that I was going to either get kicked out or drop out of school, too.

Before I started college, my little sister bet me that she would finish college before me.

And my mom later told me that she always knew I was gonna leave college.

If you hadn't started Facebook, There would probably be something like Facebook now.

Would it have to have been something that started out as a network for college students?

Was that thermal so powerful that the winner would have had to be 1 of these college things or could MySpace have sort of morphed and grown and become it?

I don't think it had to be a college thing.

1 of my earliest memories from Facebook was I used to get pizza almost every night with 1 of my friends who I did my computer science problem sets with.

We used to talk about technology and where we saw the world going.

I remember 1 of our conversations right after I launched Facebook was about how I was really excited to offer this service for our community, but that 1 day, clearly, someone was going to build this for the world.

It hadn't even crossed my mind that maybe we would be the ones to do it.

Because from my perspective, it's like, all right, we're just college students.

What do we know about building software that hundreds of millions of people use?

Clearly this is going to be something that, you know, Microsoft or Google or Yahoo or someone like that who builds these services that tons of people use is going to do it.

When was the point when you realized you were going to do it?

Like how many schools did you have before you realized that this was probably it?

It was probably later on when we went outside of college.

the point where you had hundreds of colleges, you still thought some big company was going to come along and do this better?

Well, not necessarily the college part, but I didn't know that we were going to be the people building the community to kind of connect everyone.

In retrospect, though, it was pretty obvious.

You know, I actually, I spent a bunch of time analyzing and reflecting on why it was that we were even able to do it, because all reasons suggest that we shouldn't have been able to do it, right?

Because all these other companies had way more engineering power and servers and time and money and all this stuff.

And I actually think that this is a pretty instructive thing for anything that you wanna go do, because the same property is gonna be true for anything that you guys start, is that someone else is gonna have more resources and be able to do it.

The reason why I think we actually ended up being the ones doing it is because we just cared way more about it than everyone else.

So there were always projects at some of these other companies that were these hobbies, but we always thought that it was this really important thing and really just like felt in our gut and our heart that we wanted to do it.

And early on, there were always these skeptics saying that, oh, this can't be a business.

We didn't actually care that much about it being a business early on.

But a lot of the reason why bigger companies didn't invest in it was because it wasn't clear that there was a model that would work for it.

Yeah, and I actually think that that's true for a lot of the best ideas.

Where it is that it's not that someone else can't do it, they actually can.

But I think often that belief and the fact that you just care so much about what you're doing is the only thing that kind of drives you to do it.

And to be honest, that kind of drives me to this day.

I mean, 1 of the big emphasis points for the company right now is internet.org.

And for a while, we had this rallying cry of can we connect a billion people?

And When we started talking about that, we thought that was crazy.

It was way bigger than any service in the world that had been built.

But then the thing is, as we started to actually get closer to that, we took a step back.

And we're like, all right, well, our mission isn't actually to get 1 in 7 people in the world to be connected.

So it's a big issue that only around a third of the people in the world have access to the internet.

And that's something that we think that we can do something about.

And similar to early Facebook, There's no business model around this.

I mean, all the people who have all the money in the world, I mean, it's not necessarily a fair thing, are already the people who are on Facebook.

It's like, this is what we are here to do.

So we're just going to keep pushing on it.

And I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it's kind of irrational at the time, but so it kind of selects for the people who care the most about it doing it.

Do you think there's anything about you, like a personal quality of yours besides sort of basic smartness and determination that made you well suited to work on this project?

I realize this requires some introspection.

Yeah, I actually think determination is probably the biggest piece.

You know, it's so many things go wrong when you're starting a company.

And often I think people ask, you know, what mistakes should you avoid making?

And, you know, my answer to that question is don't even bother trying to avoid mistakes because you're gonna make tons of mistakes.

And the important thing is actually learning quickly from whatever mistakes you make and not giving up.

And there are things every single year of Facebook's existence that could have killed us or made it so that it just seemed like moving forward and making a lot of progress just seemed intractable, but you just kind of bounce back and you learn and nothing is impossible.

You just have to kind of keep running through the walls.

So the biggest mistake is the sort of meta mistake of letting a mistake moralize you.

Do you think Facebook had a rougher time?

Like do you think it ran into more obstacles early on than typical startups?

Because now you've known, you know a lot of other people who've started startups and you've heard all the ghastly stories about what goes on behind the scenes.

Do you think it was more of a shit show or less?

Well part of the reason was because I knew nothing when I got started.

Right, I mean, you have to remember, I was 19 years old when I started Facebook, right?

So, I mean, probably like the same age or younger than most of you guys.

And I knew nothing, nothing about business at all.

And I didn't even think that I was starting a company.

I actually remember when I first came out here for the summer with Dustin because we wanted to learn from Silicon Valley companies.

I remember driving up the 101 and seeing all these great companies and thinking to myself, wow, these are such amazing companies.

Maybe 1 day I'll start a company and I'd already started Facebook, right?

And it hadn't occurred to me that that was actually, so- How did you learn?

But there's so many mistakes that just come from not, I mean, like I really knew so little at the time.

I mean, like when Peter Thiel came in to invest, 1 thing that he demanded was that all of the founders be on vesting schedules.

And I didn't even know what a vesting schedule was.

So, I mean, part of the early conflict that I had with Eduardo, who's 1 of our founders who then left, was he was at Harvard with us.

We kind of decided, okay, if we started a company, we'd divide the equity up this way.

We hadn't heard of vesting schedules, and then he just bounced.

He never moved out to California with us.

So Peter was like, oh, all you guys have to be on vesting schedules.

I mean, it's like that mistake probably cost me billions of dollars, but it's fine.

You just, you move forward and you can't, it doesn't matter, right?

I mean, you just kind of keep pushing forward and that's how it goes.

So you start out as a 19 year old, right?

And you have this website that's just like going through the roof.

Ron was talking earlier about how very early on the graphs just were going up very steeply.

And you had to learn how to create this organization.

That's the next phase after you raise money and you have something that's growing.

I don't think anyone is naturally good at hiring out of the box.

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Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013