I just think that VR and AR are going to be a really big deal.
— Mark Zuckerberg
Bill Gates has always been a mentor and inspiration for me even before I knew him. Just growing up, I admired how Microsoft was mission-focused.
Just take terrorism, for example. We have a team of more than 200 people working on counterterrorism. I mean, that's pretty intense. That's not like what people think about what Facebook is.
We don't sell data; we don't allow anyone to sell data.
As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.
In general, we're a social network. I prefer that because I think it is focused on the people part of it - as opposed to some people call it social media, which I think focuses more on the content.
2018 is an incredibly important election year, not just with the important midterms here in the U.S., but you just had the Mexican elections. You have Brazil. You have India coming up at the beginning of next year. There's an assortment of elections around the EU. We're very serious about this. We know that we need to get this right.
What really motivates people at Facebook is building something that's worthwhile, that they're going to be proud to show to friends and family.
The connectivity declaration is about uniting the whole industry - a lot of companies that typically compete very fiercely - to push in a coherent direction.
Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.
I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog. And I mean, we don't have a lot of furniture in our house, so it's really simple. And we're trying to build products for everyone in the world, right. And you don't want to get isolated to do that.
When we are thinking about stuff like embeds, we are not thinking about how we are competing with YouTube. We are thinking about how are we going to make it more useful for people to share stuff on Facebook.
Move fast with stable infrastructure.
Our role is to be a platform for making all of these apps more social, and it's kind of an extension of what we see happening on the web, with the exception of mobile, which I think will be even more important than the web in a few years - maybe even sooner.
I think humans are just hard-wired to process people's faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.
Connectivity is a human right.
It's really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.
I do think that we're gonna move towards this world where eventually you'll be able to capture a whole experience that you're in and be able to send that to someone.
I care about helping to address these problems of social cohesion and understanding what economic problems people think exist.
We're at a point now where we've built AI tools to detect when terrorists are trying to spread content, and 99 percent of the terrorist content that we take down, our systems flag before any human sees them or flags them for us.
It's not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.
There are really two core principles at play here. There's giving people a voice so that people can express their opinions. Then, there's keeping the community safe, which I think is really important. We're not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things.
The community - more than two billion people use our products, and we get that, with that, a lot of people are using that for a lot of good, but we also have a responsibility to mitigate the darker things that people are gonna try to do.
Now the playbook is we build AI tools to go find these fake accounts, find coordinated networks of inauthentic activity, and take them down; we make it much harder for anyone to advertise in ways that they shouldn't be.
Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.
We know that for every 1 person who get access to the Internet, one new job gets created, and one person gets lifted out of poverty. So in theory, going and connecting everyone on the Internet is a large national and even global priority.
If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same. If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different; if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change.
We have a very open culture at the company, where we foster a lot of interaction between not just me and people but between everyone else. It's an open floor plan. People have these desks where no one really has an office. I mean, I have a room where I meet with people. But it has all glass, so everyone can see into it and see what's going on.
Video is growing very quickly on Facebook. A lot of people compare that to YouTube. I think that kind of makes sense. YouTube isn't the only video service, but I think it's the biggest, and it probably makes more sense to compare Facebook video to YouTube rather than Netflix because that's a completely different kind of content.
I think a lot of the time there isn't such a black-and-white difference between what's a platform and what's an app. It's really just like the most important apps become platforms.
Our strategy is very horizontal. We're trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically, we're trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social, whether it's on the web or mobile or other devices. So inherently, our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one.
The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.
We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere - a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer - can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the Internet.
We talk about this concept of openness and transparency as the high-level ideal that we're moving towards at Facebook. The way that we get there is by empowering people to share and connect. The combination of those two things leads the world to become more open.
I always tell people that you should only hire people to be on your team if you would work for them.
Frankly, I think that the news industry is critically important because it points out things and surfaces truths that can often be uncomfortable. I think that that's working, and the spotlight has been pointed on things that we have a responsibility to do better, and I accept that.
I actually think people generally have an awareness and feel like, 'Wow, these networks have a lot of information.'
What we will do is we'll say, 'Okay, you have your page, and if you're not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.' But that doesn't mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed.
There are disasters that happen - Hurricane Harvey came up, and you had people self-organizing through the community and getting in boats and driving around rescuing people coordinated ad hoc through this network. That's not a media function.
In retrospect, I do think it's fair to say that we were overly idealistic and focused on more of the good parts of what connecting people and giving people a voice can bring.
We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don't check in code anymore.
We are a mission-driven company. In order to do this, we have to build a great team. And in order to do that, you need people to know they can make a bunch of money. So we need a business model to make a lot of money.
After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn't even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.
It wasn't until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.
People like to talk about war.
You get a reputation for stability if you are stable for years.
Our goal is to make it so there's as little friction as possible to having a social experience.
Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know - not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that's kind of different from the information you put in your profile.
A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: 'If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?'
I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges... If I want to get information about you, I just go to TheFacebook, type in your name, and it hopefully pulls up all the information I'd care to know about you.
