Mark Zuckerberg’s advice for Startups and Entrepreneurs

Key Points:

1. The only strategy that’s guaranteed to fail is not taking risks. You’re not judged by your mistakes.

Zuckerberg: I don’t pretend that I had any idea what I was doing. I always felt like we were so close to dying in the first years, and were afraid that Google was about to build our product and we were going to be screwed, and look how long it took for them to build our product. You are going to make a ton of mistakes, you don’t get judged by that.

2. Don’t start a company just to start a company. Do what you you’re passionate about, what you think is awesome.
Zuckerberg: There’s this culture in [Silicon Valley] of starting a company before they know what they want to do. You decided you want to start a company, but you don’t know what you are passionate about yet … you need to do stuff you’re passionate about. The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.

3. Don’t sell out for the money. If you want to follow your vision, don’t sell the company; things will change.
Zuckerberg: The only reason why it’s this big story that everyone knows about us turning down a lot of money is because I messed up the process. It’s one of the biggest management mistakes I made through Facebook’s whole history. I learned a lot about the team at that time, and ended turning over a lot of that same team. I wasn’t in it for the acquisitions, and I wanted people around me who were in it for the long-term, he said.

Full transcript:

0:06
alright everyone um that was fun next up
0:11
is Mark Zuckerberg or so psyched to have them back here for things the third year in a row thank you for coming and we’re
0:18
going to do some QA
0:29
I’m just glad I didn’t have to participate in the last session you know
0:34
brutal Paul would have said you know what you can do mark you wouldn’t have probably done that to you whatever that
0:40
one of the coolest things about a Silicon Valley in and all the technology that’s been built up is that you can
0:47
just try all this stuff right so I mean so Paul is up here giving you guys awesome feedback but I think one of the
0:53
one of the awesome things is that you can take it or you don’t have to take it and you can try it and I don’t know it
1:00
just it strikes me as one of the awesome things that’s happening the world right now is that just because of all this technology that’s been built up everyone
1:06
can just go try out their ideas and you don’t have to go through any intermediary I’m so psyched you brought this up because one of the questions I
1:12
was going to ask you I’m gonna skip all over the place but um like Facebook had
1:17
for where you are now you have this sort of unique philosophy of like you have this willingness to kind of break things
1:23
and try things out and sometimes it works sometimes it breaks so was this a conscious effort where did you get that
1:30
idea to have this willingness to break things well we made this observation early on that most companies mess up by
1:39
moving too slowly and trying to be too precise right and you want to you want
1:45
when you’re making mistakes are moving quickly or doing anything like this you you want to make mistakes evenly on both
1:52
sides right so we wanted to set up the culture so that we were equally messing up by moving too quickly and by moving
1:59
too slowly some of the time right so that way we know that we were in the middle right i mean like another example
2:05
of where we have this is in hiring right i mean if you are if you have too high
2:10
of a accept rate on people who are making offers to then that probably means that you’re paying people too much
2:15
right i mean you should get like in order to find the market equilibrium you should be messing up equally on both
2:21
sides so i don’t know i just think that that’s a mistake that I’m that most companies make too much as they move too
2:27
slowly they’re too afraid of making mistakes we have the saying that I I try to put into almost every all hands at
2:35
Facebook that the biggest risk is not taking any risk right because the world
2:41
is changing so quick we write n sure any given risk that you might take you might mess up and and you
2:48
it might end up being really bad but in a world that’s changing really quickly the only strategy where you’re guaranteed to fail is not taking any
2:55
risk and not changing anything right so you have to take risk so the biggest risk is not to take any risk I think
3:01
that you just want to manage things that you basically you’re not making the mistakes that everyone else is making of
3:07
course we’re gonna make different mistakes but but I think oh that’s cool all right so we’ve been talking today and a lot of people during our talks
3:14
have talked about early days and you know that’s my favorite part I always ask you about that so early on tell me
3:20
about one of your biggest technical problems or bottlenecks that you had
3:25
well the biggest issue I think that we had early on and if you look at the
3:31
problems of social networks as opposed to some of the systems that came before you know whether it’s search or Yahoo
3:39
style content where they’re showing the same kind of content a massive scale to a lot of people that the first
3:45
generation web problems were all about scale right how do you index this massive amount information how do you
3:50
take a piece of content and serve it to a huge number of people and build up the infrastructure to do that and one of the
3:56
solutions to that that everyone adopted and built up was good ways of caching good ways of building these scale systems with social networks and these
4:05
new types of social software it’s a little harder to do that because everyone has a fundamentally different
4:10
experience if I go to search and type in Jessica I’m going to get a different set of results based on who my friends and
4:16
friends of friends and and people or pages that that people who I care about
4:22
have liked then anyone else here is going to get so that makes the technical problems of caching just a lot more
4:28
tricky and I think that one of the defining things about Facebook is we are an extremely technical company I mean
4:34
the people who started the company we’re all really technically the caching stuff that we that I just mentioned I mean I
4:41
basically implemented the first version myself the first version was really
4:46
rough I mean now we’ve scaled it into in memcache it’s this big open source project now and it’s I mean I don’t even
4:52
recognize the code anymore it’s it’s so it’s so different now it’s like handles multiple data centers and
4:57
like a hundred thousand times more throughput but but I think that having a
5:02
company were especially when you have these kind of technical issues where you have the same people thinking through the product challenges and the
5:08
experience that you’re trying to create all the way down the stack to actually implementing it is a really critical
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thing and i don’t i don’t know i’m not sure if i have quite as much empathy for
5:20
the current set of technical issues that a new startup would have today because
5:25
i’m sure they’re different than the ones that we had when we were getting started but i think that that same principle of having the people who are making the
5:32
product decisions also understand all the technical trade-offs is actually it’s like fundamentally valuable in
5:37
building a product so way back then how did how fast did you grow in terms of
5:43
employees in like the first year do you remember leading up oh we did it I mean
5:48
I was in denial that we were gonna make a company um I i mean the the the way we
5:54
evolved i think is probably pretty weird so I mean I when I was at in college I had a lot of conversations with my
6:00
friends usually over over pizza about the direction that we thought the world was going to go in and and to us it was
6:07
just like okay clearly eventually there’s going to be this API and in this platform that every application that you
6:14
use is going to be social right because everything is better when you have your friends they’re both on an emotional level and a kind of information
6:19
efficiency level you can find stuff more easily you get matched up with better stuff so it’s kind of it we took we kind
6:27
of assumed that that would happen and but we just figured you know it’s like why would we do it we’re college
6:32
students I was sophomore at the time I was like surely there are companies that are more competent than the NASA at
6:38
doing this and I think what it turned out is you know we didn’t want to start a company but we just we started
6:43
building it I mean I started building the first version and then my roommate Dustin joined and then I mean Andrew
6:49
joined us and he was with with you guys for a while at YC and we I just think we
6:55
cared more I mean so we cared more about seeing this happen then than anyone else so we just kind of had each step along
7:00
the way even though we weren’t the most qualified we built it we built in and we worked hard but we didn’t expect it to
7:06
be a company in we were just building this thing because we thought it was awesome right and and we wanted to exist and we thought it was
7:11
going to exist and originally built it for just our school because we wanted it there but then all these other people started writing to us and asking for it
7:18
so we said okay well we can start expanding and then more of my friends joined and then it was sophomore year
7:24
and my freshman summer I’d stayed in Cambridge working at some some
7:30
programming jobs around Harvard so I went to dust and I said you know I don’t want want to be around Boston for this
7:36
summer let’s go out to Silicon Valley where it’s like seems like this magical place where all these startups come from surely will learn something maybe one
7:43
day we’ll make a startup clearly this isn’t a start-up I mean if you Facebook whatever but um so we moved out and and
7:52
just as an added touch on top of that we got a couple of interns we had this programming competition it was not like
7:59
in the movie there’s no drinking or hacking but there was a programming competition and and we took the two best
8:06
kids and we all just lived in a house and um and it was a lot of fun and then
8:14
you know I mean we’d gone through iterations I mean we tried selling the company up the first time it was like a disaster and we didn’t actually set it
8:19
up correctly we set up as an LLC based out of Florida because that’s where Eduardo happened to live at the time we
8:24
knew nothing about anything I can setting this stuff up and we just kind of iterated and kept going and made like
8:29
a ton of mistakes but and then finally I guess we got hooked up with with a good
8:35
lawyer out here and we incorporated and decide okay we’re going to turn this into a company it probably wasn’t until
8:41
a year or so after that we stopped working out of our house and finally got our first office and in downtown palo
8:47
alto now i think right above the haagen-dazs and um I don’t know I I mean
8:53
I actually think we still have a lot of that spirit today I like fundamentally we’d never went into this to build a
8:58
company I think it turns out one of the things that I’ve I I believe this now
9:03
after after kind of living with it for six years is that I think a company is actually the best vehicle in the world
9:10
to align a lot of really talented people to make some change that you want to make because you can if you succeed then
9:17
you can reward people both on a mission level for what the organization is doing and financially and so you can pull in
9:24
people with all these disparate talents who are awesome at these different things and so part of building a company
9:29
is making sure that you’re rewarding people making sure that you’re building a strong revenue stream and profits that
9:35
you’re sustainable but I mean fundamentally I mean I think we still actually have the same outlook I mean we’re doing this because we think that
9:41
what we’re doing is awesome and it should exist and no one else is doing it yet I want to ask you about that Europe to like 3,000 people employees yeah yeah
9:49
unless so what’s the difference between running a company that was only 50
9:54
people versus where you are now because you guys have a great culture I know that I mean one of my friends I think
10:03
put this pretty well when your engineering one of the kind of
10:10
fundamental things about engineering is that you never do the same thing twice because we’re going to do the same thing twice you you just abstract it right and
10:18
so when when we’re building a company you know first you start off and you’re writing code yourself and then you kind
10:25
of read abstractions for the codes that way more people can handle it and then your your engineering with other people and setting up systems that you can
10:31
engineer together then maybe you’re managing a small team and then maybe you’re managing people who are managing teams and all that and um like building
10:40
a company is no different than the normal process of engineering I think you know what is management and what is
10:46
engineering it’s taking a problem in decomposing it down into smaller problems right and and when you do that
10:52
what you end up with by the time that you have a company of whatever it is 2,500 or 3,000 people is you basically
10:59
just have a lot of different 50 person teams and the 50 I mean of 50 people is even too big to think of as a unit of a
11:05
team I think three four five people I think as a unit of a team and I’m when
11:10
you do this well you’ve decompose the problem well and you’re thinking really clearly about what the problems are I mean you have clear definitions and
11:16
clear distinctions that you’ve empowered everyone to go do their thing well and when you’re not doing it well then your
11:23
company is basically a mess and you set up all these dynamics where there’s a huge amount of politics because the
11:28
lines aren’t clear between things and I don’t know think it’s engineering all the way up and down so tell me a little bit about
11:35
your growth group speaking about how you’re organized like that’s very unique to facebook and tell me more you started
11:42
it tell me about it and tell me when what they discovered that you’re like oh my god glad we have a growth group and
11:48
not like making it an implicit goal for everyone to focus well one of the fundamental kind of the first insights
11:56
that we had was that one of the main features of Facebook or in one of these
12:03
networks is that your friends are there right so while with any one of your companies of course you want it to grow
12:09
right you want more customers and you want to increase the impact that your company is having but for a company like
12:15
Facebook it’s actually deeper than that because in a way the one of the biggest
12:21
features that we can provide for people is that when they come to the service their friends are there and that we can
12:26
help them find them easily so on two levels both strategically in terms of wanting to grow and scale the company
12:33
and in terms of trying to give people a better experience which these things were aligned we decided we weren’t just
12:38
going to leave this to chance and try to build features and hope that things grow over time we wanted to build a core
12:44
competence at the company of growing and scaling and helping people find their friends more easily and in in helping
12:51
them map out their their connections so I think in company is one of the
12:57
decisions that you make because you’re managing a company is you you have to choose all these things whether you’re going to centralized or decentralized
13:02
them right and you know I’m a big example normally is I know what’s a good
13:08
example marketing right it’s like do you have a separate marketing group or like
13:13
you have each team do their own marketing right and it’s like usually it’s a little bit of both but when you want something to really work normally
13:19
you centralize it right and you say okay I want someone who’s only responsibility it is is to make this thing work and you
13:26
give them that focus and you kind of decomposed that problem and we just saw that we were going to do that with growth growth is kind of a sleighing
13:32
what we I mean the team is called spreading Facebook right and getting people on facebook so um so we set up
13:39
that team and I actually think it’s one of the best operational things that that we did we learned
13:45
huge amount about our users and and their patterns on the site and what
13:50
helps them stay connected and stay engaged and basically what are the key things to help them use the service and
13:56
it’s actually one of the things operation that we’ve exported to a bunch of other companies I know Dropbox for example recently started a growth team
14:02
and in a bunch of other companies too and I would really advise you guys when it’s when you’re the right phase of your
14:08
growth once you have a product that you’re happy with you want to centralize things like that that are competences
14:14
that you that you want to build up in your company you think of something that they happened upon that like surprised you like wow that’s so cool yeah I mean
14:21
so one thing was we didn’t really have great analytics before about what would
14:28
make it so that people used Facebook would stay engaged or what wouldn’t and we came upon this magic number that you
14:35
needed to find 10 friends right and once you had 10 friends you had enough content in your newsfeed that there
14:42
would just be stuff on it on a good enough interval where it would be worth coming back to the site I’m speaking
14:47
about the point of using Facebook isn’t to use the features of facebook it’s to use it to share and connect with all
14:52
these people so 10 is basically the minimum so we re-engineered the whole flow of having someone sign up to get
14:58
all this extraneous out of the way and just make it so that the only focus at the beginning is helping people find
15:03
people to connect with and we honed what the tools were to get them to do that but it’s gonna be different things for
15:09
different companies but I think for each of your company’s once you get a core product that you’re happy with I think
15:15
it’s worth going through and having the discipline to do to basically do this exercise that’s cool so to get to where
15:23
facebook is now you had to turn down a lot of acquisitions along the way if you had to give advice like a little how-to
15:30
guide on how to handle acquisition offers along the way of growing your business what would you say well so we
15:38
really had one phase of this and I think you know the only reason why it’s this
15:45
big story that everyone know is that we turn down a lot of money is frankly because I messed up the process right i mean if you don’t want to sell your
15:51
company don’t get into a process where you’re talking to people about selling your company it’s um I mean it
15:58
so I mean honestly I think that that was one of the biggest management mistakes that I made through Facebook’s whole
16:04
history and it was it was really I mean it was interesting because I learned a lot about the team and I ended up
16:09
turning over a lot of the team after that because I kind of discovered that a lot of people being able to sell a
16:14
company for some number of hundreds of millions of dollars or a billion dollars and it’s clearly i’m a huge I mean that’s an awesome outcome but that’s not
16:21
what I was in it for and I wanted people around me for whom that’s what they were in it for was was to build a company for
16:28
the long term so it ended up being a really interesting event just to kind of see the psychology of a number of people
16:33
around me as we were going through that process but I mean the biggest thing is you should know what you want to do
16:40
where I mean you you ask the question of how do you turn down offers um it’s not
16:45
clear to me that the answer is that you should turn down offers right in our case it was because I’m not because the
16:51
company went on to become more valuable because it was what we wanted to do right and I mean if you if you start a
16:56
company and you own and control the company I mean you should take the company in the direction that you think it should go in and um but I mean but
17:03
that said there are a lot of really good reasons why people do sell their companies and often i’m on the other end
17:09
of that now because facebook is now an acquirer of a lot of companies and you know I really respect it when I talk to
17:15
people I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and when people are you know I really want to build this I respect that but one of the big reasons why people want
17:22
to sell their company to us at least is because they feel like there’s a problem
17:27
that they can solve that’s different from what their startup is doing right and I mean take for example I mean one
17:33
of those companies that we bought was it was a new york-based company called drop drop EO right and and we bought that
17:41
company and a bunch of the folks joined and that the CEO of that company led the timeline project at Facebook which is
17:46
going to be rolling out pretty soon and um I mean the reason why that person joined is because you know we had a long
17:52
time we spent a long time together and he decided that he was gonna have a bigger impact working on that at
17:57
Facebook that he was with his company and and that he thought that was gonna be a lot of fun working together which it has been and I’m so I think he really
18:05
likes that decision but I think that the core thing that you need to keep in mind is that if you go through some big corporate change
18:11
whether it’s selling the company or some huge investment and you change control of the company or something it’s just not gonna be the same right if we’d sold
18:17
to yahoo they wanted to do something different than we wanted to do with it if what that company wants do is aligned
18:22
with you want to do then Sully isn’t that bad but if what you want to do is build it out for for you um in with the
18:28
original vision then I can almost guarantee you that’s selling your company to someone else is not going to be the best way to do that so just don’t
18:33
do it did you even meet with people really early on who might have wanted to buy you for much smaller amounts of
18:40
money just curious yeah but I mean we really had no idea what we were doing so
18:46
um so okay yeah so I need that I want to
18:51
ask you early on about raising funding yeah just a little bit um it’s out there
18:57
the stories out there that in but when you were in Boston you met with battery ventures and I want you to go back to
19:03
that meeting and tell me sort of how you pitched facebook and how they responded
19:09
to it I mean clearly they passed and perhaps that was a mistake they said but
19:14
but take me back what was it like you know what how did they respond I don’t
19:20
know I I barely remember that I agree that it happened I don’t think I said
19:28
anything I think Eduardo said some things and then they did not want to do
19:34
it but it’s fun because I wasn’t going to do it anyway um I mean we were kind of we were this phase where you know in
19:42
a lot of the way that it that I’ve run facebook is facebook i think at its essence is the product that we build
19:50
right so as a CEO I want to make sure that I’m spending the vast majority of the time that I have on on building
19:58
those products and recruiting people who are going to build those products for the long term and that’s kind of how I spend my time so in order to do that you
20:05
need to have a really strong team around you and it each step along the way I that’s one of the things that I that I
20:10
focused on so early on Eduardo thought you know okay we need to one of the things that we need to do is raise some
20:15
money and I was just really skeptical of VCS still am but there’s some good ones
20:23
that you know that’s one of the reasons why eventually we ended up taking money from Peter teal is because I felt like
20:28
he could relate to us on a founder level and he really has lived up to that through the the the whole time that he’s
20:35
coached Facebook and pin on our board he has given us advice from the perspective of a founder and not a money manager
20:42
which I really respect and can relate to and even you know I mean there’s there’s
20:47
the story that has been told a lot about how we ended up making taking money from Excel which was I was going to take money from a VC then either we were
20:53
gonna take money from Don grammar runs the Washington Post because I felt this is a guy who’s had this company in his
21:00
family for generations he knows something about running a company for the long term right and I fell like that
21:05
was really lacking in all the interactions that I had when I was talking to people around Silicon Valley because everyone was talking about flipping companies and all that and I
21:11
just felt it was really unattractive to me so so I i was thinking okay well i was we were very far down the path of
21:18
taking money from Don and then at the end he was like you know you have this other offer from from gym at Excel and
21:24
I’ve worked with Jim on some things and he’s actually gonna be a lot more helpful to you guys than I am so you
21:30
should take that and that’s really really so at the end of the day I got the best of both worlds we’ve got the
21:35
investment from Jim and Donna’s now on our board so but that was a pretty good
21:40
experience I don’t know it I don’t actually think vc’s are bad I just think you want to make sure that you find
21:45
people who are aligned with you that that’s really important so back you know
21:52
early on what tell me about something that surprised you I’m sure you ran into some surprises early on and do you still
21:59
get surprised by things yeah I don’t know I feel like the way that I talk
22:04
about the past I think it’s pretty clear that most things were surprises um I don’t really pretend that I had any idea
22:14
what I was doing um I don’t know I think
22:19
like so there’s all these weird surprise like one of the one of the philosophies
22:25
that we have is like there’s like a thousand things going on at any given point in time and there’s like one or
22:30
two that actually matter and you need to focus on those so you can be surprised there’s probably like a thousand things
22:35
that surprised us smaller magnitudes I mean probably the most inspiring surprising thing is that
22:41
you can be so bad at so many things and and like learn along the way and as long
22:47
as you stay focused on how you’re providing value to your users and
22:53
customers and you have something that is unique and valuable that you understand and that you’re providing then you get
22:58
through all that stuff I mean there’s this tendency i remember when i was i’m a really impatient person and you can
23:04
just ask anyone who works with me and um you know I in in our first years I I
23:11
just always felt like we were like so close to dying right or like it was like right around you know it was gonna you
23:18
know Google or some other company was like right about to build our product we were gonna be screwed right and um look
23:25
at how long it took them to build our product but um but you actually you end
23:32
up having a lot of time um and you you have time to learn you’re not going to
23:38
know everything going into it up front and um I don’t that’s okay just I mean
23:44
stay focused on on the stuff that that you’re that you’re providing to your users you’re gonna make a ton of
23:50
mistakes it doesn’t matter you don’t get judged by the mistakes people don’t remember those years from now they
23:56
remember the things that you did that we’re good so why did you get it right i mean half this room probably doesn’t
24:03
know what they’re we’re all doing but why like are you Mark Zuckerberg you know like what what did you do right to
24:10
win oh so I spent a lot of time thing
24:17
about that um oh uh I mean I could there’s publish
24:26
something about how my mom raised me um um a good Jewish mother you know go home
24:34
get 99 on tests why don’t you get 100 come on um I don’t know well one of the
24:41
things that that worries me when I mean so I think stuff like this is awesome right it’s like you guys are all out
24:46
here you’re thinking about the companies that you want to build I mean this is actually potentially one of the only
24:52
parts of the American economy that’s going really well right now right is is that stuff in technology is growing
24:58
really quickly and I mean you guys you have the power to just don’t you can sit
25:04
down you can code something you can try it doesn’t matter to you whether someone thinks it’s a good idea or not because you have the power to go put that online
25:10
and you know see whether it resonates and connects with people totally lost my
25:17
train of thought so great um maybe maybe
25:23
I tried to change the topic I I asked a question because a lot of these people so to be a successful man I totally
25:30
forgot where I was going with that hello we can let’s go into the next question
25:36
all right so you did a lot of other project but if I remember where is going
25:41
on yeah if you remember then interrupt me well cuz I think it’s really important I want to know the answer to
25:47
it that’s why I keep asking um I remember okay so um
25:56
I do that all the time I was like real spacy okay so um one is so I think this
26:04
is actually one of the awesome things about the the American economy now and one of the things that worries me is
26:10
that there’s this culture out here in the valley of people going to start companies before they know what they
26:17
want to do where it’s like you’ve decided that you want to start a company but you don’t know what you’re passionate about yet I actually think
26:23
there’s this huge self-selection bias we’re like because I didn’t go into this trying to start a company the only way
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that I was going to end up starting a company or running a company was if that thing had so much momentum that it was
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going to go Carrie itself despite the fact that I didn’t want to start a company and make me go start a company to do it so i don’t know i’m not saying
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that that’s the only way to do it clearly people have all these stories I mean I mean Jeff Bezos clearly I mean one of the I think great entrepreneurs
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of our time who I really respect I mean he very clearly knew that he wanted to start a company and then wrote a
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business plan on a napkin while I think the myth is while driving across the country to Seattle so there’s all these
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different ways to do it and that’s that’s I think you shouldn’t just try to emulate one model but I do think you
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need to do stuff that you’re passionate about I mean I think like there’s I’m sure there’s this huge bias towards the
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companies that work our companies that the people really cared about and had some vision for what they wanted to see
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exist in the world not just because they wanted to start a company so I do you think I mean if you wanna if you want to be on a path where you’re going to be
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psyched about what you’re doing and I mean I listen to what Paul was saying earlier and I really agree you know if
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you are doing a company and it goes even moderately well you’re doing it for five years right annum so do something that
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you like that’s good advice um so back when you’ve done a lot of projects
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before Facebook was there a moment when you’re working on Facebook that you’re like oh wow this is this is this is
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gonna be big oh I mean it just kind of kept going the big thing that I really
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wanted to do was build out this development platform I actually I was talking to my friends about building out
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a platform worm before I even started working on Facebook and I facebook i think is this
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it’s this great app and it’s this great thing where you can you know you can stay connected and see what’s going on
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with your friends lives but i think that this story when we look back on this in
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five or ten years is going to be disproportionately that the apps and things that were built on top of
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facebook are what people remember about this time in the industry I mean I often
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talk to to our company and outside the company about this narrative where the last five years of social networking have been about getting people connected
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right the next five years or whatever it’s going to be 5-10 years are now
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going to be about what are all the things that you can build now that you have all these connections in place and I mean just like like anything I mean it
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took a while for the internet to get wired up and for it to get enough adoption that that people primarily
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started building internet software instead of shipping cd-rom starting there was a time in the 90s when like
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and there were companies like AOL that that they just extend out a ton of cd-roms and it’s there was like this
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tipping point where there’s still a bunch of companies doing cd-roms and a bunch of company is doing internet stuff and like if you just pick the wrong one
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then you died and in like I I think that we’re probably at like either at or very
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close to that inflection point with social software to where it’s like you could not build stuff on top of a social
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graph or you can build it on top of a social graph and I think pretty soon it’s just going to be this point where
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look all of the stuff that you guys are going to build are going to be on top of something like this in some capacity and
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it will be a losing strategy to not do that and i think that the real story
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that people are going to look back on is going to be that not not any time that people spend on facebook com or anything
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like that so what was the original question
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take out there I forget I’m an last question which is can you think of
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a story besides the LLC florida LLC from when you’re really small like two or
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three people that you would do differently like a story that well you’ve really screwed it up and you do
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differently if you could go back in time well if I were starting now I would do
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it very differently but I knew nothing back then so I mean one actually one
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interesting thing is I mean so how many you guys are actually from Silicon Valley versus are traveling out here for some period of time well maybe let’s do
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the inverse how many people are traveling alright so it’s like a meaningful amount um you get this
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feeling when you’re out here that you kind of have to be in Silicon Valley right you have and there’s all these
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great engineers out here there’s great universities there’s a lot of great VCS and you can get people to help you set
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up a company well so that way you’re not structures in LLC in Florida you can read data center space like all the
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stuff um it’s not the only place to be I think if and I I think it’s actually if
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you’re a beginner and you don’t know anything about this stuff it’s actually an excellent place to be because a lot
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of the stuff that you wouldn’t understand how to do on your own like like I didn’t I could just get help from
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a lot of other people but honestly if I were starting now I just would have stayed in Boston I think really yeah why
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oh I think like there’s there’s a difference in their aspects of the
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culture out here where I think like it still is a little bit short term focused right in a way that that bothers me you
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know whether it’s like people who want to start companies to start a company not knowing what they like I don’t know
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to like to flip it or like people I don’t know it’s like I think it was I
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had a conversation with Bezos about this one time the average amount of time that someone stays in a job in Seattle is
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almost twice as long as it is out here and I mean that’s not necessarily good for for itself but if you believe that
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like the first a year of doing anything you’re just kind of like learning what the hell you’re doing and then like to
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do anything really good it takes like at least a few years after that I think there’s this culture out here where like people just kind of like they don’t
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commit to doing things right and they don’t feel like they’re I don’t know and
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there’s nothing wrong with experimentation to you need to do that before you kind of dive in and decide that you’re going to do something but I
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don’t know I feel like if you a lot of the companies that have been built outside of Silicon Valley I just think
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our seem to be on a longer term cadence and the ones in Silicon Valley do it for whatever isn’t so you would have stayed
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in Boston I don’t know maybe they’re reporting like New York to the reporters in Boston will love that I’m not sure I
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haven’t run that experiment but it but I think it’s definitely an option as I guess what I would say right you don’t
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have to move out here to do this but what about all the sort of serendipitous things that happened to you out here oh
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no I knew nothing so I had to be out here Facebook would not have worked if I’d stayed in Boston but like I think
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that now knowing more of what I know I think I might have been able to pull it
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off and I think there’s enough I mean one thing it kind of goes back to your first question about like why do we try
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to move quickly when the mistake that everyone else makes is moving too slowly and and my whole analysis of kinda you
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want to make mistakes on both sides I just think that there’s such an advantage to doing things differently
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than other people are doing in ways that like I don’t know if you can even express it mathematically it just like I
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don’t know just if you doing something
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that’s different from what everyone else’s you could fail miserably right because often there’s a reason why no one else is doing it but that’s how you
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really win right i mean if you’re doing something that everyone else is doing a little bit better than like how much can you win or change the world doing that
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so i don’t know i think like there’s there are great people all over the world there are great engineers who are
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probably not going to move out here from all these different places and i don’t know i think like the more I I would
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just like as advice and I give this to all of our teams at Facebook I mean just
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like it’s like what are you doing that’s different from like what everyone else would do if they were solving this problem and and there’s
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probably ways to gain different advantages and do things that feel different and are better in different
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ways just by doing things differently that’s a good place to end so it’s a great place so thank you for coming
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alright