Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2011

By streamliner Oct 30, 2011

In the Valley you can "just try all this stuff," feedback- and idea-wise, thanks to tech.
Is it a conscious effort to willingly "break" things at Facebook?
- Want to mess-up equally, moving too quickly and slowly.
- "Biggest risk: not taking any risk."
Early technical bottlenecks?
- With social, the previous (simple) scaling solutions don't apply.
- People making product decisions need to have technical foundation.
Difference between a 50- and 3000-person company?
- Building a company no different than engineering: decomposed problems in small teams.
Facebook's "Growth Group"
- At a company you often centralize important things, e.g. Marketing. Facebook has a centralized group for "Growing Facebook."
- Dropbox and other companies have adopted too.
- Discovered that ten friends is the magic number. Redesigned the signup flow to get people to ten friends.
How do you handle acquisition offers?
- "Messed up the process" by engaging in acquisition talks without actually wanting to sell a company.
- Take company in direction you think is right; in some cases that's selling.
  - Drop.io founder wanted to have a bigger impact, so he sold to FB.
On early fundraising:
- Pitch to Battery Ventures (who passed)? Mark barely remembers, but agrees that it happened.
- Mark was and remains "really skeptical" of VCs.
Biggest surprise: you can be bad at many things. As long as you stay focused on providing value, you can make it.
- Early years he worried failure was around the corner. But look how long it took Google to build their product.
- People don't remember mistakes
Why are you Mark Zuckerberg? What did you do "right" to win?
- (Tries to skip it after losing train of thought.)
- "I remember." (laugh)
- Culture of starting companies before knowing what you want to do.
  - Because Mark started off not trying to start a company, the only way he would was because the idea was so right.
- Was in denial Facebook was going to become a company.
  - "Cared more" about seeing social happen.
  - Hired interns -- "not like the movie" -- with a programming contest.
  - A Company is the best vehicle to propagate change, because you can reward people on both a mission-level, and financially.
The next 5-10 years of social will be "what can you build?" -- now that social connections are in place.
If starting now he would have stayed in Boston.
- The Valley culture is still too short-term focused.
- In the Valley people don't commit.
- (But then says Facebook needed to be in the Valley, because he didn't know anything.)
- Doing something different is how you really win.

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