- The speaker discusses the early days of Facebook and the factors that contributed to its success.
- The use of school email addresses as a form of real identity was crucial in establishing a culture of authenticity on the platform.
- The speaker predicts that the amount of information shared on social networking sites will continue to increase exponentially.
- The inclusion of course catalogs in early versions of Facebook helped establish a college-specific culture, but eventually became less important as the platform expanded.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of quality and going above and beyond to make a product the best in its field.
- The speaker recalls the initial server cost of $85 and the focus on efficiency and scaling.
- The speaker highlights the value of taking time to develop and optimize a product, rather than growing too quickly.
- The early expansion of Facebook to different schools was successful, although some schools took longer to adopt the platform.
- The speaker mentions that Facebook was initially built for college use, but quickly expanded to include users outside of college.

- The speaker and his friend cared more about making Facebook exist compared to other companies like Microsoft.
- They launched Facebook at schools that already had school-specific social networks to ensure their product was better.
- The speaker believes that the amount of sharing on the internet determines the success of certain products.
- Facebook listened to user feedback and observed behaviors to improve their platform, such as adding photo sharing.
- The speaker did not have a specific plan after college but may have pursued an engineering job.
- Starting a company should be based on personal passion and impact, with flexibility to explore different options.
- Facebook went through multiple pivots and expansions to adapt and grow.
- The key feature that kept people coming back to Facebook was not mentioned.

- The feature that kept people coming back to Facebook was the ability to connect and share with others.
- Facebook extended people's social capacity and allowed them to stay connected with more than the typical 150 people.
- MySpace could have survived if they focused on meeting new people rather than trying to copy Facebook.
- Many products and apps today are socially integrated, but copying other companies' ideas is not successful.
- The need to stay connected with people is fundamental, and Facebook fulfilled that need.
- The founder of Facebook built the first version during a dead month at Harvard and visited California, where he was impressed by the technology companies and the weather.

- The speaker and their friends decided to rent a place in Palo Alto, California during their sophomore summer.
- Initially, they didn't plan on moving or dropping out, but wanted to be around other successful companies.
- They realized they needed an operations person and decided to take a term off from Harvard to manage their growing user base.
- They raised money from Peter Thiel, who didn't believe they would go back to school.
- They continued to delay going back to school as their user base grew.
- The speaker mentions Harvard's policy of allowing students to return at any time.
- The speaker has to leave for a wedding after the conversation.

- The speaker discusses the early days of Facebook, including the use of school email addresses and course catalogs to establish authenticity and a college-specific culture.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of quality and scalability, as well as the value of taking time to develop a product.
- Facebook's expansion to different schools was successful, and the platform quickly expanded to include users outside of college.
- The speaker believes that the success of certain products is determined by the amount of sharing on the internet.
- Facebook listened to user feedback and observed behaviors to improve their platform.
- The speaker did not have a specific plan after college but may have pursued an engineering job.
- Starting a company should be based on personal passion and impact, with flexibility to explore different options.
- Facebook went through multiple pivots and expansions to adapt and grow.
- The feature that kept people coming back to Facebook was the ability to connect and share with others.
- MySpace could have survived if they focused on meeting new people rather than copying Facebook.
- Many products and apps today are socially integrated, but copying other companies' ideas is not successful.
- The need to stay connected with people is fundamental, and Facebook fulfilled that need.
- The founder of Facebook built the first version during a dead month at Harvard and was inspired by technology companies in California.
- The speaker and their friends moved to Palo Alto, California to be around successful companies.
- They decided to take a term off from Harvard to manage their growing user base and raised money from Peter Thiel.
- The speaker has to leave for a wedding after the conversation.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, at Y Combinator Startup School on October 20, 2012. 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/

Presented in Stanford Memorial Auditorium by Y Combinator and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

So, these are the questions that I was curious about, and I think they'll be the questions you guys are curious about, too.

I'm going to ask a lot about the very early days of Facebook.

We were just talking about them in the back.

We'll do our best to try and reproduce it.

So here's a question that might be a little bit difficult.

How long before 2004 could something like Facebook have succeeded?

Like what was the last thing that was needed to fall into place?

Could someone have done it in 1995 or 2000?

There were certain elements that we certainly bootstrapped off of and used to hack early identity.

So 1 of the things that people don't think about that often today is early on, we wanted to establish this culture of real identity on the service.

And there weren't really any other online services or communities where people were openly their real self before that.

And 1 of the ways that we determined that someone was really who they said they were and their credentials were real were everyone had school email addresses.

And I don't know how much before 2004, I assume, probably around 2000, all schools started issuing email addresses.

But that was really this critical thing that made it so that we could get started.

But it was this counterintuitive thing that not many other services were using.

So school email addresses were the original source of identity.

Well that's how we knew what school you were in.

Right and that you weren't just a sock puppet because you can't just get the school to keep

So it also it made it so people couldn't sign up for fake accounts, right?

People typically only have 1 school account.

So being able to bootstrap off of that was this really nice early thing that helped us establish this culture of real identity.

And then once we got to a few million people or 10 million people where that culture was established, it was able to bootstrap into something that was much bigger that kept most of that culture, even though now, obviously, most people in the world don't have emails that are issued by some institution that vouches for their identity.

But to your question about when would it have been possible, 1 of the big trends that we see is that the amount that any individual shares in a given year seems to be growing at this exponentially increasing rate.

Yeah, I don't call it that, but other people do.

But it is this kind of social networking version of Moore's law, and that's interesting.

And what that suggests to me is if we expect that this rate is going to double every year, then look out 10 years, 2 to the 10th is 1024, right?

So 10 years from now, people will be sharing about a thousand times as many things.

I'll have to get better adhesion next year.

I feel like everything will be cool anyway.

So I think the question is not would Facebook have not been possible before 2004.

It would have been in some capacity, but people would have shared less.

And if you fast forward 5 years, there's going to be a version of, there are going to be all these social services that people are using to share way more.

And I think that anyone here could be, can kind of think about, you know, okay, 10 years from now, people are gonna be sharing a thousand times as much stuff a day if this trend continues.

What things are gonna have to exist in the world?

What kind of services are gonna have to exist in order for that to be possible?

I mean, they're they're doing really well.

When you first launched in the very beginning the features were sort of Profile with like a profile photo and your name and who you are And also you included things like what house you lived in, what dorm you lived in, and what courses you were taking.

Do you think it would have worked without that?

Would it have been enough just to have profiles?

You know, it's a really interesting question.

And we certainly since then have evolved and wanted to make a more general service, so we've dropped some of those things.

But I remember there's this early debate that Dustin and I had where we had to do some manual work for every school that we released Facebook at.

And in order to do that, we basically went through and we parsed the course catalogs of the schools to make sure that the data was clean.

And I remember having this debate where Dustin was like, we could just expand so much faster, or it would just be easier.

But it would be easier to launch new schools if we didn't have to have course catalogs for each school.

And we just had this really long debate about what quality meant for us and the community that we wanted to establish and the culture of it.

And In retrospect, maybe it wouldn't have had a huge difference on how things played out.

But it definitely set this tone where there's a lot of clean data on Facebook.

It feels like a college-specific thing, which was valuable early on for setting the culture, even though, obviously, since then, we've grown beyond that.

And I think you guys in the projects that you work on, you're going to have a lot of similar questions.

There's the famous 80-20 rule, where you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work.

There have to be certain things that you just are the best at, right?

And that you go way further than anyone else had to establish this kind of quality bar and have your product be the best thing that's out there.

So, you know, whether we had to do that 1 or had to do something, we had to do, I think, enough of those things or else we just wouldn't have been the best service out there.

Do you remember when you got rid of courses?

When did you stop including course catalogs?

think probably when we expanded beyond colleges.

I think we eventually figured out a way that just crowdsourced it and made it a bit easier once we had enough data that we could extrapolate from the colleges that we had in place.

But we did it for probably way longer than was rational.

Do you remember how much your first server cost?

Yeah, and I remember that because that was the gating factor for us launching new schools.

And we had this philosophy from the very beginning that we didn't want to be this project, it wasn't even a company at the very beginning, but we didn't want to be burning a lot of money.

We weren't planning on raising a lot of money.

We didn't want to be 1 of these things that raised a bunch of money and was losing a bunch of money and then decided that we'd somehow pull it through at the end.

And so $85 for the first server put ads on the site.

And the ads at the beginning were just we're running some kind of ad network.

And they were- Do you remember what the first ad was?

Yeah, he basically was responsible for making sure that we had enough money to keep things running in the beginning.

And Dustin and I basically worked on efficiency and making sure that we can fit more schools onto each server.

And Eduardo worked on selling more ads or making a deal so we can get an ad network so that way we can make more money.

But then whenever we had more money, we rented another $85 a month server, and we kind of went from there.

And it's just an interesting way of scaling.

never spent money you didn't have in the beginning.

DOUG LLOYD, JR.: That was the constraint on your growth rate?

Because sometimes it's really nice to have the time to get your product to be awesome and deal with scaling problems.

And 1 of the things that was interesting was, at the time, I don't know how many people remember this, but Friendster was the service that had massive scaling problems.

And the idea was they grew quickly and it was really hard for them to scale.

And the fact that we could go college by college and optimize the service and make it more efficient and offer new features but make sure that they worked, I think was really key.

I mean, you're talking about people who had never built a company before.

We'd never built any large-scale software or anything.

So having that period where we could just bake it.

And people these days like to talk about how these services grow super quickly.

And Facebook did grow quickly, but I think it took a year for us to get a million users.

And we thought that that was incredibly fast.

But it wasn't as quick as a lot of things grow today.

And I think actually having that time to bake it was really valuable for us.

And there were like 2,000 users at Harvard?

Well, there are, I think, around 4,000 or 5,000 undergrads at Harvard.

I mean, presumably you have more than that now.

thirds or 3 quarters or something in the first 2 weeks.

So I mean, the thing that we found was that basically, we'd open it up at a school.

And within a couple of weeks, then the vast majority of the students would be on the service.

Was there a school ever that you opened it, and it didn't work?

Some schools took longer than others, depending on the size of the school.

So what we basically did was, so I launched it at Harvard first because I wanted it.

I really wanted to be able to use the service.

And this is 1 of the ironies is I started building Facebook because I wanted to use it in college, and then I immediately left college.

Just expand it to everybody else outside college.

But so then after Harvard, all these schools started, a lot of students from other schools started writing to us and asking for us to expand.

And we weren't looking to start a company.

And I figured that eventually something like this would exist at large scale.

But 1 of the interesting juxtapositions that was going on at the time was, I remember distinctly, I had this 1 friend who I went and got pizza with almost every night.

We did all our computer science problem sets together at Harvard.

And at the time I remember talking to him about how I was working on this Facebook thing and I thought it would be cool for Harvard and I really was excited about it because I wanted to use it.

But at the same time, how I thought that over time, someone would definitely go build this version of this for the world.

It was going to be Microsoft or someone who built software for hundreds of millions of people.

We're not qualified in any way to build this.

And I think a lot of my takeaway from that was that we just kind of cared more than those other companies about making it exist.

So back to your question and off that tangent, the first set of schools that we launched at after Harvard were schools that had other school-specific social networks.

So I think it was Stanford had something, Columbia had something, and I think Yale had something.

Why did you choose ones that had school-specific social network?

Well, I wanted to go to the schools that I thought would be the hardest for us to succeed at.

Because I knew that if we had a product that was better than everything else that other students were making at other colleges, then it would be worth investing in and putting time into.

But I didn't want to just get into a project where there would end up being this huge legacy of maintaining it if ultimately there were just going to be different things that were as good as it.

So we thought that this was going to be good.

And we launched it at Yale, Stanford, Columbia.

And yeah, pretty quickly, I think it just.

So you felt probably that you could have just gone to some random school and it would have succeeded.

You chose those because they had nascent competitors.

Yeah, I mean, I think what we saw at those schools was people wanted to use something like this, right?

So we just wanted to make sure that what we had was, like, way better than anything else that was out there and worth putting time into.

Do you think, I know I read in the Crimson article about when you first launched, hundreds of people sign up for new.

Hundreds sign up for new Facebook website.

That is not the onion, that is the crimson.

Okay, so do you think though, they said in this article that Harvard, the Harvard computer services people were working on at university-wide Facebook.

Their problem was to like, they couldn't figure out how to restrict information enough, right?

Do you think if that had already existed, if you had been a couple years younger and you'd come to Harvard and this already existed, do you think you would have ever started Facebook?

I don't know, I mean, there's this trend that I was talking about before, where each year people share more and more.

So I think that you can kind of map out, at any given point, and I think you can look at the internet and say, OK, there's enough sharing to support certain products.

So Wikipedia came really before Facebook, because there was a smaller amount of sharing could support information about all the public entities in the world.

But in order to have enough sharing to support some basic information so you can look up anyone and find some interesting stuff about them, then that required more sharing.

So we had to be further along this curve.

And a couple years earlier, someone might have been able to do something that was more basic.

But a couple years later, even a couple years from now, someone will be able to build something that is just so much more encompassing and allows people to learn so much more about the people around them than what is even built today.

So our kind of continual mission and job is to keep on building that next thing.

And I mean, that's what we live for at Facebook and what excites us.

So even if Harvard, even if the university had built something, there would always, you could have built the next thing.

Yeah, and it's obviously always hard to tell exactly how things would have played out.

But 1 of the interesting things about Facebook was it wasn't just a picture and some basic info.

I mean, it pretty quickly gave people the ability to share more stuff.

And 1 of the early stories that I think is pretty instructive for anyone who's trying to build a startup is we really listen to what our users wanted.

And listening means both kind of qualitatively listening to the words that they say and quantitatively looking at the behaviors that they take.

And at the beginning, we had 1 profile picture that you could have on your profile.

And what we observed was there was this behavior where a lot of people would, every day, upload a new profile picture.

And our takeaway from this was that there was this very strong demand to have a service where people could share more photos.

And it actually wasn't until we had the server capacity and the engineering team bandwidth to actually build a full photo sharing service.

But that's become, obviously, 1 of the key parts of Facebook.

I think we're over 300 or 400 million photos shared a day now.

But obviously, no Facebook that any university would have built would have supported that.

any incremental, they would have just had whatever mugshot you have on your card, right?

You couldn't even have chosen the picture.

Yeah, I can totally see how it would have been.

Do you remember when you first showed up in college what you planned to do afterwards?

Did you think you were gonna go to graduate school or did you think you were going to get a job?

first went to college, I actually was planning on being a classics major.

I loved classics in high school, Latin and Greek.

And my sister actually did go on and do that, and she's now a PhD student in classics, and we talk about this all the time, it's just still fascinating to me.

When I was in college, I actually wasn't a computer science major, I was a psychology major.

I didn't really get around to taking that many classes, because I left pretty quickly, and I actually ended up taking more computer science classes than psychology classes.

No, I probably would have gotten an engineering job, is my sense.

And I- You'd have gotten sucked into programming.

And I really, you know, growing up, I always had a lot of respect for Microsoft and what they built.

And a lot of people from Harvard go to Microsoft and went to Microsoft.

I don't know, it's really obviously hard to say.

Later, I made this bet with my sister Donna, the classics PhD I was talking about before, who I bet her when I was starting college before she was, or she bet me that she would finish college before me.

And I was like, all right, I'll take that bet.

And then after, when I dropped out, I was talking to my mom.

And she's like, yeah, no, I always knew you would drop out of college.

That you would zoom out of the top or fall out of the bottom?

Do you think your parents knew that you would always run your own show?

I mean, if you asked them, I think they'd probably say yes.

actually a really interesting part of this for me is, and I mean, being in a place like this, where obviously a lot of you guys are thinking about starting companies.

And for me, so much of the lesson that I feel like I've learned is I feel like it's really hard to decide to start a company.

Facebook, I didn't start it to start a company.

I started it because I really wanted this thing personally, and I believed that it should exist globally, although I wasn't quite sure that we would be able to play a role in doing that.

And it was mostly just through kind of like wanting to build it and having it be this hobby and getting people around me excited that it eventually kind of evolved into and got the momentum to become a company.

But I never really understood the psychology of deciding that you want to start a company before you understand what you want to do.

And I know that that's not, that that's different from your philosophy on this.

No, no, believe me, I wish we would get more people who were the company started them rather than vice versa.

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Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012