Interviewer:
Welcome to How to Build the Future. Today our guest is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark, you have one of the most influential companies in the history of the world, so we are especially excited that you are here.
Mark:
I'm not sure where to go from there.
Interviewer:
Why don't we start with just the early days of Facebook? Tell us what it was like when you started it.
Mark:
Sure. So for me, the thing that I was really fascinated by and always have been is people and how people work. When I was in college, I studied psychology and computer science, and one of the things that you learn when you study psychology is that there are all these parts of the brain which are geared just towards understanding people, understanding language, how to communicate with each other, understanding facial expressions, emotions, processing. Yet when I looked out at the Internet in 2004, which was when I was getting started, you can find almost anything else that you wanted. You could find news, movies, music, reference materials, but the thing that mattered the most to people, which as other people and understanding what's going on with them, just wasn't there. And I think what was going on was that all that other content was just out there able to be indexed by search engines and other services, but in order to understand what's going on with people, you needed to build tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with themselves. I wanted to figure out what courses to take, so I built this little website, Course Match, that just made it so that you could enter what courses you were taking, and you could click on them and see who else was in them, and it did all these correlations. It told you people who took this course were likely to enjoy this course too. And the thing that just struck me from the beginning is people would just spend hours clicking through. Here are the courses that people are taking, and, wow, isn't it interesting that this person is interested in these things? It was just text, right? There was nothing that was super interesting there, but that just struck me as people have this deep thirst to understand what's going on with those around them. And there were probably 10 other things like that that I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got around to building the first version of Facebook that kind of added a lot of these things together.
Interviewer:
Did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started?
Mark:
I built the first version of Facebook because it's something that my friends and I wanted to use at Harvard, a directory and a way to connect with the other people around us, and I didn't think at all that it was going to be a company. I remember very specifically the night that we launched the first version. I went out
to get pizza with a couple of my friends who now work here. And I remember really clearly we were talking about how one day we thought that someone was going to build a community like this for the world and that that would be some company, but it clearly wasn't going to be us. It just, it wasn't even...
Interviewer:
It didn't even occur.
Mark:
Yeah, no. I mean it wasn't even an option that we considered that it might be us. We just weren't focused on building a company back then. We were just building something that we thought would be useful at our school.
Interviewer:
So as you look back, is there something that made Facebook different from the other projects that you had built that allowed it to turn into this, the company it is today?
Mark:
Well, for one, I think we kept going [laughs], so the others, Course Match and just the other different crowd source tools, they kind of served their purpose and then we were done, whereas with Facebook there was just such...people loved it and had such an intensity of using it. I think within a couple of weeks two-thirds of students at Harvard were using it. And all these other students at MIT and other local universities were writing in asking us if we could open up a Facebook at their school, so we kind of just followed that. Again, I didn't set out and my roommates didn't set out to build a service that we were going to turn into a company, but we just kind of followed what people wanted, and that led us to expand it to all these other schools and eventually beyond schools and to...at some point, once we'd hired a bunch of people, we decided to turn it into a company and go for this mission of connecting the world, but that's not where we started.
Interviewer:
As you think about where you did start, is there other advice that comes to mind that you give to other people that want to build projects that you can take away from the early days of Facebook?
Mark:
Yeah. I always think that you should start with the problem that you're trying to solve in the world and not start with deciding that you want to build a company. And the best companies that get built are things that are trying to drive some kind of social change even if it's just local in one place more than starting out because you want to make a bunch of money or have a lot of people working for you or build some company in some way. So I always think that this is kind of a perverse think about Silicon Valley in a way, which is that people decide often that they want to start a company before they even decide what they want to do, and that just feels really backwards to me. And for anyone who's had the experience of actually building a company, you know that you go through some really hard things along the way. And I think
part of what gets you through that is believing in what you're doing and knowing that what you're doing is really delivering a lot of value for people, and that's, I think, how the best companies end up getting made.
Interviewer:
I want to talk for a second about low points because I think people never appreciate how bad they really are, and I think it's always reassuring to hear that even Mark Zuckerberg went through some serious low points and came out okay. So can you tell us about some of the hardest parts in the history of the early history of Facebook?
Mark:
Yeah. I think one of the hardest parts for me was actually when Yahoo offered to buy the company for a lot of money, because up until that point, that was the turning point in the company where before that every day we'd just come in and kind of do what we thought was the right next thing to do. We'd open to more schools. We opened to high school and beyond schools and launched more photos because that's what seemed like the next thing that we needed to do to help people express themselves and understand more what was going on around them. But then Yahoo came in with this really meaningful offer, a billion dollars for...
Interviewer:
And this was how far into the company?
Mark:
It was a couple of years in, and we had 10 million people using the product at the time, so it wasn't as if it were obvious that we were going to succeed far beyond that, and that was the first point where we really had to look at the future and say, "Wow! Is what we're going to build going to actually be so much more meaningful for this?" And that caused a lot of interesting conversations in the company and with our investors, and at the end of that, Dustin and I just decided, "No, we can think that we can actually go connect more than just the 10 million people who are in schools. We can go beyond that and have this really be a successful thing." And we just had to go for it, but that was really stressful because a lot of people really thought that we should sell the company. And for a lot of folks who joined a startup, I feel like at that point I hadn't been very good about communicating that we were trying to go for this mission. We just showed up every day and just kind of did what we thought was the right next thing to do. So for a lot of the folks who joined early on, they weren't really aligned with me. For them, they joined, and being able to sell a company for a billion dollars after a couple years, that was like a home run. And it is a home run, and I think that that's...I get that, but I think that the fact that I didn't communicate very well about what we were trying to do caused this huge tension. And the point that was painful wasn't turning down the offer. It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing. If you look at the management team that we had...