We started off as this platform inside Facebook; and we were pretty clear from the beginning that that wasn't where it was going to end up. A lot of people saw it and asked, 'Why is Facebook trying to get all these applications inside Facebook when the web is clearly the platform?' And we actually agreed with that.
— Mark Zuckerberg
The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.
When Facebook was getting started, nothing used real identity - everything was anonymous or pseudonymous - and I thought that real identity should play a bigger part than it did.
Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January.
A lot of people are focused on taking over the world or doing the biggest thing and getting the most users. I think part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely.
I actually don't read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.
What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that's a problem that's probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that's actually within the range of affordability.
I remember flying in, driving down 101 in a cab, and passing by all these tech companies like Yahoo! I remember thinking, 'Maybe someday we'll build a company. This probably isn't it, but one day we will.'
We're very focused on making News Feed really good, making our photos experience really good, making messaging really good, and creating great location apps. That's the nature of a platform business of our scale. Most companies that are relevant to us will have some overlaps in some competitive way.
I feel like the thing we can do is celebrate people doing great work and create more cultural momentum and awareness that this is an important thing in the world. So when the next economic crisis hits and people are talking about where to cut from the budget, science isn't the thing.
If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.
We pay attention to every demographic in every country, so we're going to focus on building things that teens are going to like, and we're also going to focus on building things that other folks are going to like.
I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person. It's a pretty good test.
If we're trying to build a world-class News Feed and a world-class messaging product and a world-class search product and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality and build drones, I can't write every line of code. I can't write any lines of code.
We help Chinese companies grow their customers abroad. They use Facebook ads to find more customers. For example, Lenovo used Facebook ads to sell its new phone. In China, I also see economic growth. We admire it.
It's against all of our policies for an application to ever share information with advertisers.
You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you're not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.
When I started Facebook from my dorm room in 2004, the idea that my roommates and I talked about all the time was a world that was more open.
There are definitely elements of experience and stuff that someone who's my age wouldn't have. But there are also things that I can do that other people wouldn't necessarily be able to.
Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we're continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we've taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.
I like making things. I don't like getting my picture taken.
Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don't do that by having a service people pay for.
There are good examples of companies - Coca-Cola is one - that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come.
Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
It's, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we've had some very serious ups and downs.
Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.
If I could snap my fingers and do one thing in science, I would get more funding for basic science. But the level of funding that needs to be done is not on the order of millions, like the cost of the Breakthrough Prizes. It's billions to tens of billions.
I wear the same outfit or, at least, a different copy of it almost every day.
Facebook and Instagram are both really popular with teens, both in the U.S. and globally across the world. I think what you're starting to see is that there are all these different ways that people want to share and communicate.
One of my big regrets is that Facebook hasn't had a major chance to shape the mobile operating system ecosystem.
I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world... If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.
The majority of people who don't have Internet, don't have the Internet because they don't know why they want to use the Internet.
People love photos. Photos originally weren't that big a part of the idea for Facebook, but we just found that people really like them, so we built out this functionality.
One of the things that we're trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren't all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.
It's a juicy thing to say we're building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it's so clearly the wrong strategy for us.
About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.
When we were a smaller company, Facebook login was widely adopted, and the growth rate for it has been quite quick. But in order to get to the next level and become more ubiquitous, it needs to be trusted even more.
There's a level of service that we could provide when we're just at Harvard that we can't provide for all of the colleges, and there's a level of service that we can provide when we're a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things.
A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it's the most ridiculous concept.
When most people ask about a business growing, what they really mean is growing revenue, not just growing the number of people using a service. Traditional businesses would view people using your service that you don't make money from as a cost.
The thing that's been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is - I think then, and I think now - that if we didn't do this, someone else would have done it.
I'm trying to make the world a more open place.
We're a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones - apart from the iPhone - can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we'd only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn't do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into 'Facebook phones.' That's what Facebook Home is.
I believe we have to nip Ebola in the bud before it spreads through Africa and to other countries.
While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.
We have these services that people love and that are drivers of data usage... and we want to work this out, so that way, it's a profitable model for our partners.
There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn't how we've approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.
Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn't smooth. You'll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don't believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don't give up.
I think what we've found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about, they tend to be more engaging. I think that we're really going to see this huge shift where a lot of industry is and products are just going to be remade to be social.
Hackathons are these things where just all of the Facebook engineers get together and stay up all night building things. And, I mean, usually at these hackathons, I code too, just alongside everyone.
