# Mark Zuckerberg on building a startup

**Author:** Mark Zuckerberg
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5s-mark-zuckerberg-on-building-a-startup
**YouTube ID:** Lb4IcGF5iTQ

---

Mark is a cofounder of Facebook.

Facebook is one of the most influential companies in the history of the world. Over 1.1 billion people use it every day.

Access podcast and transcript versions of this interview here: <http://www.ycombinator.com/future/mark/>

## Transcript

welcome to how to build the future today our guest is Mark Zuckerberg uh Mark you have built one of the most influential companies in the history of the world so we are especially excited that you are here I'm not sure where to go from there um why don't we start with just the early days of Facebook um tell us what it was like when you started it sure so for me the thing that I was really fascinated by and and always have been is um people right and and how how people work um you know I was in college I I studied psychology and computer

science and you know 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 right understanding language how how to communicate with each other um understanding facial expressions emotions processing um yet when I looked out of the internet right in in 2004 which is when I was getting started you can find almost anything else that you wanted right you could find news uh movies music uh reference materials but the thing

that mattered the most to people um which was other people and like understanding what's going on with them it just wasn't there right and I I think what was going on was that all that other content was just out there able to be indexed by you know search engines and and other services but in in order to understand what's going on with people you needed to build uh tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with themselves you know I wanted to figure out what courses to take so I I built this little website course match that uh you know 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 it did all these correlations so it told you people who who who took this course were likely to enjoy this course too and you know the thing that that just struck me from the beginning is you know people would just spend hours clicking through the here are the courses that people are taking and wow like isn't it interesting that this person is interested in these things and and it was just text right there was nothing that was like super interesting there but that just struck me as you know people have this deep thirst to understand what's going on

with with those around them and um you know there were probably you know 10 other things like that than I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got around to to building the first version of of Facebook that kind of added a lot of these things together did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started I I built the first version of Facebook because it's something that my friends and I wanted to use uh at Harvard a directory and a way to connect with the other people around us and I I didn't think at all that it was going to be a company I remember very specifically the night that that we

launched um the first version I I went out to uh to get pizza with um a couple of my friends who um who who now work here and you know 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 uh and that that would be some company but like it clearly wasn't going to be us I mean it's it just it wasn't even it didn't even occur yeah no I mean it wasn't even an option that we considered that it might be us I mean we

we just weren't focused on building a company back then we were just building something that that that we thought would be useful at our school 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 was today um well for one I think we we kept going right so I me the the others I mean cour match and um you know just the the other different crowdsource tools um you know they they kind of served their

purpose and then then we were done whereas with Facebook there was just such you know people loved it right and and had such an intensity of using it I think within a couple of weeks uh 2third 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 uh Facebook at their school so we kind of just followed that right and you know again we didn't I didn't set out and you know my roommates didn't set out to 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 um and eventually Beyond schools and to you know at some point uh once we'd hired a bunch of people we decided to turn it into a company and and and um and go for this mission of connecting the world but that's not where we started 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 products uh that you can take away from the early days of Facebook yeah you know I always think

that you should start with the problem that you're trying to solve in the world and not start with um deciding that you want to build a company right the best companies that that get built are are things that are trying to drive some kind of social change even if it's just local in one place uh you know more than starting out because you want to make a bunch of money or or have a lot of people working for you or or build some company in some way so you know I always think that this is kind of a perverse thing about Silicon Valley in a way which is that you know 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 you know 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 is really delivering a lot of value for people um and and that's I think how the best companies end up getting made I 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 yeah I think one of the hardest parts for me was um was actually when Yahoo offered to buy the company for for a lot of money because up until that point that was the turning point in the company where before that we uh

every day we just come in and kind of do what we thought was the right next thing to do right we'd open to more schools we we open to high school and opened Beyond schools and um you know launched more photos so because because that's what it seemed like the next thing that that we needed to do to help people Express themselves and and understand more what was going on around them um but then you know Yahoo came in with this um with this really meaningful offer right I mean a billion dollars for this was how far into the company it was a couple of years in okay right and you

know we had 10 million people using the product at the time right so it wasn't like 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 um to look at the future and say wow um is what we're going to build um going to actually um be so much more meaningful for this and you know that caused a lot of interesting conversations in the company and and with our investors and you know at the end of that Dustin and I just decided you know no we think that

we can actually go connect more than just the 10 million people who are in schools we can go beyond that and and have this really be a successful thing and we decided to go for it but that was really stressful because a lot of people really thought that we should sell the company and um and you know for a lot of folks who joined a startup I I feel like at that point I hadn't been very good about communicating that we were trying to go for this Mission yeah um you know we just showed up every day and and just kind of did what we thought was the the right next thing to do so for a lot of the folks who joined early on they they weren't really aligned with me right for

them you know they they joined and um you know being able to sell a company for a billion dollars after a couple years was that was like a home run right and and it is a home run right and and that's you know I think that that's um I I get that but you know that I think that the fact I didn't communicate very well about what we were trying to do caused um caused this huge tension and the part that was painful wasn't wasn't turning down the offer it was the fact that after that um huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in in what we were what we were doing

right I mean if you look at the management team that we had did that whole management team leave the whole management team was gone within um within about a year after that did you ever regret that decision in that period like were there are times where you were like well we should have sold um you know we were I I got really lucky because you know not only did did what I believed in end up working out but it ended up working out pretty quickly right so literally you know I think this was in the summer of 2006 and by um I

think the the next month after that we launched news feed which now 10 years later looking back at it as you know one of the most used products in the world and then we launched the ability for anyone to sign up which immediately started um growing the community so So within a few months after turning down the offer I think it was actually pretty clear that that it was the right decision but you know I think you know since then there have been much harder decisions that we've had to make where you know sometimes you have to you have to bet on something and and you know either you know bet the direction of the

company or you know bet billions of dollars on something and it's not going to be clear whether you're right for five or 10 years and you know that I think actually can end up being much harder than than this what I want to talk about next but before we go there have you ever thought about selling the company again since no after that point that was just yeah got that out of the way we're going to hire people that want to be here for a long time and yeah cool um yes so I want to talk about one of the most common questions we get from people building products is how to decide what to build how to figure out when to bet the company how to do

something totally new yeah and I think one thing that Facebook has done incredibly well is figure out what to build and be and build this repeated Innovation culture which I think is like the hardest thing to do in business so how have you done that and how do you advise other people to do the same I think the key is building a company which is focused on learning as quickly as possible Right companies are are learning organisms and you can make decisions that either make it so that

you learn faster or you learn slower and you know in a lot of ways building a company is like following the scientific method right you you try a bunch of different hypotheses and if you set up the experiments well then you you kind of learn what to do and I think that's that's an important philosophy so there are all these different decisions that we make inside the company you know everything down to um really empowering individual Engineers we we invest in this huge um testing framework right at any given point in time there aren't

there's not just one version of Facebook running in the world right there's probably tens of thousands of versions running because Engineers here have the power to um to try out an idea and and ship it to you know maybe 10,000 people or 100 thousand people and then they get a readout on how that version of what they did whether it was um a change to you know show better content in Newsfeed or or UI change or some new feature that they get a readout on how uh that version performed compared to the Baseline version of of Facebook that we

have on on everything that we care about how how connected people are um you know how much people are sharing and how much they say that they're finding meaningful content uh business metrics like how how much revenue we make and an engagement of the overall community and you know by running tens of thousands of of different experiments and and putting the power in people's hands to try all these different things you can imagine we' just make so much more progress than we could if every change had to be approved by me right or or any every idea had to come from from management so I do think that there's something very deep about building this you know

learning culture and moving quickly towards that that just helps you get ahead over time what about the the bigger bets like making a large acquisition or the roll out of Newsfeed or something like that how do how do those decisions work so I actually think when you do stuff well you don't you shouldn't have to do big crazy things right so you want to actually evolve in in a way where you're working with your community and making steps and learning so take Newsfeed for example that there was a relatively big shift but it

actually had been a couple of years in the making by watching what how people were using the service right so you know when we started off we we didn't have anything like Newsfeed that showed you updates from from what people were sharing we just had profiles and what we found were originally one of the big behaviors was people would just click around right to they'd click on different profiles um you know hundreds of them just to and they'd go through all their friends to see what people had changed right to see what the update was and and um in in their friends day and

we learned from that that people were not just interested in looking up and and learning about a person but also understanding the day-to-day changes so you know first we made this product that uh just showed in in order which of your friends and updated their profile right so that at least told you whose profile to click on and then you know the first version of Newsfeed was really simple all it did was it basically took the content that people were posting and put it in order on um on on your homepage um so I think when you're when when things are working well you you use data and

you use the qualitative feedback that you're getting from from listening to how your community is using your product to tell you what problems to go go solve and then you basically use intuition to figure out what the solutions to those problems might be and then you test those hypotheses by by Rolling them out and getting more data and feedback on that and then that gives you a sense of where to go um you know when I look at things like you know we bought um you know the Oculus team for a lot of money right I actually view that as um you

know if we' done a better job of building up some of the expertise to do some of that stuff internally then you know maybe we wouldn't had to do that but you know instead we we hadn't done that and you know the Oculus team is by far the most talented team working on that problem um so it just made sense to go make this big move but I actually kind of think as as CEO it's your job to not get into a position where you need to be doing these crazy things right you know of course it's it's inevitable you know over the period of doing stuff you'll um you know you can't be ahead of everything so it's better to um to make big moves and be willing to to do that

then you know have pride and and not do that and never admit that you that you um could have done something better in the past but but I think when stuff is working well you're you're learning incrementally and and growing that way speaking of growing um one thing I heard you say years ago is that one of the best things Facebook had done was invent the idea of a growth group um and so this is something now that I've heard a lot of Founders ask about could you tell us um is that still something you recommend people running companies put in place and and how Facebook's worked in the early days so making it so we

could grow faster was I I think the most important product feature that we uh ended up building for Facebook and you know the traditional approach to growing and marketing is you know you have a Communications Group or you have a marketing team and you buy ads and you know I think that there's some sometimes there's a place for for that um especially when you're trying to communicate something and and get a message out but if you're actually trying to um to grow a product I think the often the best lovers for doing that are within the product themselves and getting people in your community who

enjoy what you're doing uh to evangelize that to their friends and getting that to and efficiently as efficiently as possible so you know there's no magic in the growth group that we um that we built that other people can't replicate you know it's it's just being very rigorous with data investing in data infrastructure so that way you can process all these different experiments and and learn what people are trying to tell you and um and then go invest engineering and actually um trying to grow the community because I think that that's the most important feature for a lot of networks and can you tell how much of an impact that group had on the

growth rate of Facebook um yeah I think you know there overall I think it's been very big um I I don't have a number off the top of my head but I mean even just looking at you know some of these specific features that we've built like people you may know right which is yeah um you know one of the important things right again if you're you know a social product isn't that useful if you're not connected to other people you when you're using it so you know helping you

go from signing up for Facebook to connecting to the people that you care about most is probably one of the most important things that we can do another thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring and and I always tell Founders that this is the thing you have to get good at so how have you hired your team uh and and what do you look for when you bring people on if you think about it you know I started the company when I was 19 right so I can't institutionally believe that experience is that important right or else I would have a hard time reconciling um you know myself right and

and and and the company so you know we invest in in people who we think are just really talented even if they haven't done that thing before and you know that applies to people who are fresh out of University as well as you know people like um you know the CFO who took the company public had not taken a company public before right and a lot of his background was in um you know production um development at Genentech before so you know just focus on really talented people and so if you don't have the experience to look for how do you assess someone's Raw Talent um

well often you can tell from different things that they've done right so it's it's not that you know obviously everyone's done something right I mean if even if you're 19 right you've um you've done side projects and and interesting stuff um and you know I think what's what's important is not to believe that someone has to have specifically done the job that they're going to do in order to be able to to do it well one of the things that I think we've done well is is just giving the people at the company a lot of opportunity right so you know it's not just me Who start started when I was 19

and and now you know I'm running this big company there were a number of people who joined who were you know people I did problem sets with at Harvard or they dropped out of Stanford or you know different programs who have grown with the company over this long period of time and you know one of the things that I'm the most proud of is we have about 12 different product groups of the company and all of the people who are running them um with the exception of of uh one uh did not join the company running a product group or reporting to me that's amazing um and the one

exception was is David Marcus who was the CEO of a you know $50 billion public company so um you know so I'm pretty happy that that that that he's on board and and having him run a product group I think is a pretty big coup too but literally none of them started off reporting to me um you know they all start off in different in different roles some were engineers some were data analysts um some were product managers and they've all grown but I think what happens is you know people see that you create opportunities for people and and that also I think keep the best people engaged and makes the best people want to come work at your company because

they feel like oh I'm going to get those kind of opportunities too cool yeah what do you most excited about over the next 20 years what do you think will be the major Transformations how will Facebook transform how do you think the rest of the world will transform so we have this 10-year road map of Great you know three of the the big changes that we want to see in the world and we're focused on three things connectivity right so getting everyone in the world on the internet right now more than you know more than half the world is not on the internet which is you know I think a lot of people in in Silicon Valley probably take this for

granted right the the internet because you know it's it just is not uniformly available and if we want to solve a lot of the the big challenges of the world today there are not problems that any one group of people or even one country can solve right they they really involve coming together and giving everyone an opportunity to participate in in solving them um so I think connecting everyone is is really a key thing which is going to um be be great for for people around the world uh the next one is AI I think

that that's just going to unlock so much potential in so many different domains and you know we use it at Facebook for a lot of different things for showing people content that they're going to find more meaningful um for making sure that you um connect with the people you actually care about on the service but in a lot of ways the work that we're doing on AI to push the fundamental uh you know state-ofthe-art forward is exactly the same stuff that's going into systems that diagnose diseases better right or find better drugs to treat people or um that you know other

companies are using when they build self-driving cars and you know these are things that are going to save lives right I mean if you can you know I heard this story recently that at this conference where someone has built um a machine learning application where you can take a picture of a lesion on someone's skin and it can detect instantly uh whether it's skin cancer with the accuracy of the best dermatologists and and doctors in the world so you know I mean who doesn't want that right now like you're going to be able to put the power in your

doctor's hand uh to become the best doctor in the world at that thing everyone will be the best doctor in the world and that's a really fundamental thing right that um you know I I get a little bit frustrated I think when people um you know fearmonger about about Ai and how it it could end up hurting people because I think in in many real ways around diseases around driving more safe I me this is going to save people's lives and push and push people forward so that that's a really big deal I think for the next 10 years and then you know the next thing that that I always think is is going to make

a big difference is um you know every 10 or 15 years there's a new major Computing platform that comes around that allows people to do completely different things than they could do before right so you know 20 years ago you know most of us were using desktop computers they were kind of clunky you know we use them in in work because it made our work more productive but most people didn't use them for fun now we have phones which you know help us connect with each other and they're much more human devices but there's going to be another platform after that and I think that's going to be uh virtual

reality and augmented reality um and that I think is just going to help people you know be more creative um experience what other people are feeling much more immersively than than we even can through um through video and things like that today so I'm really excited about that Trend as well so you were 19 when you started Facebook um one question we hear a lot at why combinator is I'm 19 today I really want to you know do whatever I can to make the world better what should I do so so how do you advise people who are 19 today and want

to impact the world like you have you know I I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about work on it but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working and I think that if you look at the data of like the very best companies that have gotten built I I actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not from people decided upfront that they wanted to start a company cuz you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time a local maximum I totally agree and just to make this point how how far into Facebook did it actually become a company

um I don't know I think probably I think it became a a a formal Delaware company when Peter teal invested about 6 months in when we were first talking to Peter about raising money Dustin and I were very clear with him that we were planning on going back to school right I mean our um you know I started Facebook when I was a sophomore we took the summer off right no classes over the summer we were working on it and then you know our our stated game plan was to go back to school in the fall and continue working on it then but not like

sit sit in an office and work on it fulltime and Peter was just kind of like all right Sher you are I guess he knew better than we did you think he just believed that you weren't actually going to go back to school he must have I mean you'd have to ask him but I will we're interviewing him in this series I will ask that question so I I think he would probably say that he knew that we were not going to go back to school or believed that he could talk us out of it but he didn't have to it was it was pretty clear that the amount of work was just growing so quickly but we actually didn't drop out immediately we we told Harvard that we were taking one semester off and and then we told Harvard that we were taking another semester off and

then a year off and then after that we kind of decided we weren't going back uh speaking of Peter in sort of a closing question what what's the best piece of advice he ever gave you I think Peter was the person who who told me this really piy quote that in a world that's changing so quickly the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk and I I really think that that's true right I mean a lot of people I think think that

um you know whenever it comes to whenever you get yourself into a position where you have to make some some big shift in in direction or do something um you know there always people are going to point to the the downside risks of that decision and locally there may be right right I mean for any given decision that you're going to make there's upside and downside but in aggregate if you are stagnant and you don't make those changes then um then I think you're guaranteed to fail right and and not not catch up so to some

degree I think it's really right that overtime the biggest risk that you can take is to not take any risks that is a great place to leave it thank you very much all right
