Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012

[Applause] Welcome, everybody. Um, getting bigger? Yeah, yeah, I hear you guys are too. Um, okay, so um, these are the questions that I was curious about, um, and I think they'll be the questions you guys are curious about too. I'm going to ask a lot about the very early days of Facebook. Um, we were just talking about them in the back. It's, it was fascinating. I sort of wish you could have heard it. We'll do our best to try and reproduce it.

Um, so here's a question that might be a little bit difficult. Um, how long before 2004 could something like Facebook have succeeded? Like, what was the last thing that was needed to fall into place? Could someone have done it in 1995 or 2000? Yeah, no, it's an interesting question. Um, there were certain elements that we certainly bootstrapped off of and kind of used to hack early identity, right? So one of the things that people don't think about that often today is early on we wanted to establish this culture of real identity on the service. And, you know, there weren't really any other online services or communities where people were openly their real self before that.

And one of the ways that we kind of determined that someone was really who they said they were and their credentials were real was everyone had school email addresses. And I don't know how much before 2004; I assume, you know, probably around 2000, all schools started issuing email addresses. But that was really this critical thing that made it so that we could get started. It was this counterintuitive thing that not many other services were using, so school email addresses were the original source of identity. Well, that's how we knew what school you were in, right? And that you weren't just a sock puppet, 'cause you can't just get the school to keep creating new email addresses.

Yeah, so, and it also made it that people couldn't sign up for fake accounts, right? People typically only have one school account, so being able to bootstrap off of that was this really nice early thing that helped us establish this culture of real identity. Then once we got to a few million people or 10 million people, where that culture was established, it was able to bootstrap into something that was much bigger, that kept most of that culture. Even though now, obviously, most people in the world don't have emails that are issued by some institution that vouches for their identity, now people log in through Facebook. Now you're the source of identity.

Well, you know, it comes around. But, you know, to your question about when would it have been possible, you know, one of the big trends that we see is that the amount that any individual shares in a given year seems to be growing at this exponentially increasing rate. Zuckerberg's law? Yeah, I don't call it that, but other people do. You heard it here first. But, um, you know, I mean, it is this kind of social networking version of Moore's law. And it's interesting. What that suggests to me is, you know, if we expect that this rate is going to double every year, then, you know, look out. In 10 years, 2 to the 10th is 1024, right? So 10 years from now, people will be sharing about a thousand times as many things.

We have to get better, better adhesion next year. I feel like everything will be cool. Anyway, I just have a good feeling about today. I don't think that's a bad omen. No, that's wonderful. Um, so anyhow, I think the question is not, would Facebook have not been possible before 2004? It would have been, in some capacity, but people would have shared less, and if you fast forward five years, um, there's going to be a version of... there are going to be all these social services that people are using to share way more.

And I think that anyone here can kind of think about, you know, okay, 10 years from now, people are going to be sharing a thousand times as much stuff a day. If this trend continues, what things are going to have to exist in the world? Um, what kind of services are going to have to exist in order for that to be possible? Instagram for toilets? Um, that's the final frontier. I mean, Instagram is killing it. I mean, they're doing really well, so that's a good frontier.

Alright, so when you first launched, in the very beginning, the features were sort of profile with like a profile photo and your name and who you are. And also, you included things like what house you lived in, um, what dorm you lived in, um, and what courses you were taking. Do you think it would have worked without that? Would it have been enough just to have profiles? You know, it's a really interesting question, and we certainly, since then, have evolved and wanted to make a more general service. So we've dropped some of those things.

But I remember, um, there's this early debate that Dustin and I had where we had to do some manual work for every school that we released Facebook at, and, um, in order to do that, we basically went through and we parsed the course catalogs of the schools to make sure that the data was clean. And I remember having this debate where Dustin was like, we could just expand so much faster, um, or it would just be easier. I mean, we were bound by server capacity, but it would be easier to launch new schools if we didn't have to have course catalogs for each school.

And we just had this really long debate about what quality meant for us and the community that we wanted to establish and the culture of it. And, um, you know, in retrospect, you know, maybe it wouldn't have had a huge difference on how things played out, but it definitely kind of set this tone where there's a lot of kind of clean data on Facebook. Um, you can rely on it. It feels like a college-specific thing, um, which was valuable early on for setting the culture, even though, obviously, since then, we’ve grown beyond that.

And, you know, I think you guys, in the projects that you work on, you're going to have a lot of similar questions, right? I mean, there's the famous 80/20 rule, where, you know, you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work, but you can't just 80/20 everything, right? I mean, there have to be certain things that you just are the best at, right, and that you go way further than anyone else at to establish this kind of quality bar and have your product be the best thing that's out there.

So, you know, whether we had to do that one or had to do something, we had to do, I think enough of those things or else we just wouldn't have been the best service out there. Do you remember when you got rid of courses? When did you stop including course catalogs? I think probably when we expanded beyond colleges, really. So you kept doing courses all through colleges for like hundreds of colleges, is? Um, I think we eventually figured out a way that just crowdsourced it and made it a bit easier once we had enough data that we could extrapolate from the colleges that we had in place. But we did it for probably way longer than was rational.

Do you remember how much your first server cost? You said you... Oh yeah, no, $85. $85? Yeah, no, I and I remember that because, um, that was the gating factor for us launching new schools. I mean, we had this philosophy from the very beginning that we didn't want to be this project. It wasn't even a company at the very beginning, but we didn't want to be burning a lot of money, right? We weren't planning on raising a lot of money; we didn't want to be one of these things that raised a bunch of money and, you know, was losing a bunch of money and then decided that we'd somehow pull it through at the end.

And, um, so, you know, so $85 for the first server put ads on the site. And the ads at the beginning were, um, we just were running some kind of ad network, and they... do you remember what the first ad was? Um, no, I don't. Um, I don't. How did you get ads? This was Eduardo's job early on; he was your ad sales? Yeah, he basically, like, he was responsible for making sure that we had enough money to keep things running in the beginning.

And, um, you know, but basically, I mean, so server was $85, and, you know, Dustin and I basically worked on kind of efficiency and making sure that we could fit more schools onto each server. Um, and, um, and Eduardo worked on selling more ads or making a deal so that we could get an ad network so that way we could make more money. But then whenever we had more money, we rented another $85 a month server, and we kind of went from there.

And, um, I don't... it's just an interesting way of saying you never spent money you didn't have in the beginning? Not in the beginning, no. And then, I mean, even that was the constraint on your growth rate: how many new $85s you could get. Yeah, and I mean it was actually good because I, I mean, you know, sometimes it's really nice to have the time to get your product to be awesome and deal with scaling problems.

And one of the things that was interesting was, um, you know, at the time, I don't know how many people remember this, but, I mean, Friendster was the service that had massive scaling problems, and, you know, they grew quickly, and it was really hard for them to scale. And, um, you know, the fact that we could kind of go college by college and kind of optimize the service and make it more efficient and offer new features but make sure that they worked, um, I think was really key.

I mean, you're talking about people who had never built a company before; we never built any large-scale software or anything, so having that period where we could just bake it, um, and you know, people these days like to talk about how these services grow super quickly, and Facebook did grow quickly. But I think it took a year for us to get a million users, and we thought that that was incredibly fast. But, um, and I think it is, but it wasn't as quick as a lot of things grow today, and I think actually having that time to bake it was really valuable for us.

And there were like 2,000 users at Harvard. Um, that's 500x in a year; that's pretty fast. Well, there... I think around 4,000 or 5,000 undergrads at Harvard. I remember reading you got half of them. I mean, presumably you... No, there was, like, 23s or 3/4 or something in the first two weeks. So, I mean, the thing that we found was that basically we'd open it up at a school, and, um, and within, you know, a couple of weeks, then the vast majority of the students would be on the service.

Was there a school ever that you opened, and it didn't work? It didn't stick? Um, some schools took longer than others depending on the size of the school. So what we basically did was, so I launched it at Harvard first because I wanted it, right? I mean, I built it for myself. Um, I, I like, I really wanted to be able to use the service. And, you know, this is one of the ironies: I started building Facebook because I wanted to use it in college and then I immediately left college, so, um, didn't really get to do that, but, um, just expanded it to everybody else outside college, so it worked out.

Uh, but, you know, so then after Harvard, all these schools started... a lot of students from other schools started writing to us and asking for us to expand, and we weren't looking to start a company, right? And I figured that eventually something like this would exist at large scale, but, um, you know, one of the interesting juxtapositions that was going on at the time was I remember distinctly I had this one friend, um, who I went and got pizza with almost every night. We did all our computer science problem sets together at Harvard, and at the time, I remember talking to him about how, um, I was working on this Facebook thing, and I thought it would be cool for Harvard.

And I really was excited about it because I wanted to use it, but at the same time, how I thought that over time someone would definitely go build this, version of this for the world, but it wasn't going to be us; it was going to be, you know, Microsoft or, you know, someone who built software for hundreds of millions of people. It's like, who were we? We were college students, right? We're not qualified in any way to build this. And, you know, I think a lot of my takeaway from that was that we just kind of cared more than those other companies about making it exist.

So, any, but back to your kind of question and off that tangent, um, the first set of schools that we launched out after Harvard were schools that had other kind of school-specific social networks. So, I think it was Stanford had something, um, Columbia had something, and I think Yale had something. So, I think... why did you choose ones that had school-specific social networks? Because they become competitors?

Well, I wanted to go to the schools that I thought would be the hardest for us to succeed at because I knew that if we had a product that was better than everything else that other students were making at other colleges, then it would be worth investing in and putting time into. But I didn't want to just kind of like get into a project where there would end up being this huge legacy of maintaining it if ultimately there were just going to be different things that were as good as it. So, and we thought that this was going to be good.

Um, and, you know, we launched it at, it was Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and, um, and yeah, I mean, pretty quickly, I think it just... so you felt probably that you could have just gone to some random school, and it would have succeeded? You chose those because they had net competitors? Yeah, I mean, I think what we saw at those schools was people wanted to use something like this, right? So we just wanted to make sure that what we had was like way better than anything else that was out there worth, you know, putting time into.

Do you think... I know I read in the Crimson article about when you first launched, hundreds of people sign up for the new Facebook website. Um, that is not The Onion; that is the Crimson. Sometimes hard to distinguish, um, Harvard students, huh? Um, okay, so, uh, do you think, though, they said in this article that Harvard... the Harvard Computer Services people were working on a university-wide Facebook. Their problem was, like, they couldn't figure out how to restrict information enough, right?

Um, do you think if that had already existed, if you had been a couple of years younger and you had come to Harvard and this already existed, do you think you would have ever started Facebook? I don't know. I mean, there's this trend that I was talking about before where each year people share more and more, right? So I think that you can kind of map out at any given point.

And I think you can look at the internet and say, okay, there's enough sharing to support certain products, right? So Wikipedia came really before Facebook because there was a smaller amount of sharing that could support information about all the public entities in the world, right? But in order to have enough sharing to support some basic information so you can look up anyone and find some interesting stuff about them, then, um, that required more sharing. So we had to be further along this curve.

Um, and, you know, I mean, a couple of years earlier, someone might have been able to do something that was more basic, but a couple of years later, even a couple of years from now, someone will be able to build something that is just so much more encompassing and allows people to learn so much more about the people around them than what is even built today. So our kind of continual mission and job is to keep on building that next thing, and I mean that's what we live for at Facebook and what excites us.

So even if Harvard, even if the university had built something, something there would always... you could have built the next thing? Yeah, and it's obviously always hard to tell exactly how things would have played out. But, I mean, one of the interesting things about Facebook was it wasn't just a picture and some basic info, right? And, um, it pretty quickly gave people the ability to share more stuff, right?

And one of the early stories that I think is pretty instructive for anyone who's trying to build a startup is, you know, we really listened to what our users wanted, right? And listening means both kind of qualitatively listening to the words that they say and quantitatively looking at the behaviors that they take. And, you know, at the beginning, we, um, we had one profile picture that you could have on your profile, and, um, what we observed was there was this behavior where a lot of people would every day upload a new profile picture.

And, you know, our takeaway from this was that, you know, people... there's this very strong demand to have a service where people could share more photos. And, um, it actually wasn't until we had the server capacity, um, and the engineering team bandwidth to actually build a full photo sharing service but that that become obviously one key part of Facebook. I think we're over three or 400 million photos shared a day now, so, I mean, it's pretty crazy.

But, um, you know, obviously, no Facebook that any university would have built would have supported that, right? And, you know, even just like that kind of... any, yeah, any incremental... I mean, they would have just had whatever mug shot you have on your card, right, would have been your picture, so they would have chosen the picture? Yeah, you couldn't even have chosen the picture.

Yeah, I can totally see how it would have been. Um, do you remember when you first showed up in college what you planned to do afterwards? Did you think you were going to go to graduate school, or did you think you were going to get a job? Were... when I first went to college, I actually was planning on being a Classics major. I loved Classics in high school. Um, Latin and Greek, I just... I found it fascinating. Um, and my sister actually did go on and do that, and she's now a PhD student in Classics, and we talk about this all the time; it's still fascinating to me.

Um, when I was in college, I actually wasn't a computer science major; I was a Psychology major. Um, I didn't really get around to taking that many classes 'cause I left pretty quickly, and I actually ended up taking more computer science classes than than psychology classes. But I was never, you know... I don't know. So you had no plan? No, I mean, you're going to be a barista?

No, I probably would have, um, I probably would have gotten an engineering job is my sense. And I... you would have gotten sucked into programming? Uh, well, I mean, I like programming, and I really, you know, growing up, I always had a lot of respect for Microsoft and what they built, and a lot of people from Harvard go to Microsoft and went to Microsoft, and I maybe I would have done that. I don't know; it's really obviously hard to say.

Um, later, I made this bet with my sister, Donna, the classics, um, PhD who I was talking about before. Um, I bet her when I was starting college, before she was, that, um, or she bet me that she would finish college before me, and, um, and I was like, alright, that's... I’ll take that bet; it's like a two-head start. I don't know. And, um, and then after when I dropped out, I was talking to my mom, and she's like, yeah, no, I always knew you would drop out of college. I was like, oh, thanks, Mom.

So I don't know, you know, who knows that you would zoom out of the top or fall out of the bottom? I never asked; maybe I should. Do you think your parents knew that you would always, like, run your own show? If you ask them, I think they'd probably say yes. But, um, like, did you want to start startups?

No, and I mean, I think that's actually a really interesting part of this for me is, um, being in a place like this where obviously a lot of you guys are thinking about starting these companies, and, you know, for me, so much of the lesson that I feel like I've learned is I feel like it's really hard to decide to start a company, right? You know, Facebook, I didn't start it to start a company; I started it because I really wanted this thing personally, and I believed that it should exist globally, although I wasn't quite sure that we would be able to play a role in doing that.

And, um, it was mostly just through kind of like wanting to build it and having it be this hobby and getting people around me excited that it eventually kind of evolved into and got the momentum to become a company. But I never really understood the psychology of deciding that you want to start a company before you understand what you want to do. And, um, I know that that's not... that that's different from your philosophy on this?

No, no, believe me, I wish we would get more people who, who were... the company started them rather than vice versa because one of the issues is just once you... this gets back to the question of why did we... why did we first open at colleges that had competitors? I have this big fear, I think, of getting locked into doing things that aren't actually the most impactful things. And to me, this is like the trait that entrepreneurs have; they just have this, like, laser-like ability to go find where they can have the most impact.

And, you know, when you take on a new project, especially if you hire people or start a company, you're doing that project. And I mean, there are ways, there are obviously different ways that it can exit and all that, but, um, I think having the flexibility to explore a lot of different things, which you can do when you're in college, which is one of the amazing things about being in college, is you can work on all these hobbies, um, and code a lot of stuff and try a lot of different things. It's this amazing flexibility that I think most people take for granted.

And once you decide, okay, I'm going to start a company, and I'm going to do it with someone else, you immediately now need to convince someone else if you want to change your mind on something. And I, I think people really undervalue the option value and flexibility. So, Dan, college, um, I think explore what you want to do before committing is really like the key thing and keep yourself flexible.

Um, and no, I think that that's... I mean, I agree. Yeah, but I think... and you can definitely do that within the framework of a company. But I think you have to be wary about starting a company too rigidly because you're going to change what you do. I mean, people talk about pivots all the time as if it's like, it didn’t... didn't your thing didn't work, so you pivoted? Facebook pivoted many times.

Um, just that, you know, we kind of... we were college and then we were not college, and then we were just a website, and then we were a platform, right? And, um, you're going to change what you do, right? And, um, you have... there's another word for the kind of pivots you were talking about: expansions, right? That's not what people usually mean by pivoting.

Well, you know, flexibility. Yeah, um, I'm curious, when you first started, like, there's a difference between making something where people sign up and making something where people keep coming back, right? What was it you were talking about, the way you measured people's behavior? What was the feature that kept people coming back to Facebook over and over again once they created their profile?

I mean, I think it really just gets down to what makes humans human, right? I mean, like, this comes back to my studying psychology and all that, but I mean the human brain is kind of uniquely wired to process things about people, right? It's like when I see... when I look out, I see faces. I don't see, you know, chairs or the room around people. It's like we're hardwired to think about people.

I mean, there are whole parts of, you know, the visual cortex that just process the slightest kind of micro movements of your face to process emotion. This is like what people are and what fascinates them, um, and it's how we, um, how we process the world. I actually, I heard the study recently that I think is interesting, which is that most humans, if you take an MRI when they're dreaming, they dream about social interactions, and humans are the only animal that does that.

Um, so now, okay, but there was no service online that... I mean, when I thought about the internet before Facebook, um, there were all these things. I thought Google and search engines were amazing, right? You can type in something and get access to any information that you wanted, but you couldn't learn about the people around you, right? And, um, because most of that information isn't public and just out there ready to be indexed by some search engine.

So, um, so there had to be a service that gave people the power to share the things that they wanted and control it in the way that they wanted. Um, and, and Facebook did that, and I think that it's, you know, one definition of technology that I think is interesting is it extends some natural human capacity, right? So, glasses or contacts extend your ability to see, right? Steve Jobs once famously compared a computer to being a bicycle for your mind, right? And, um, basically extending your ability to think.

And I mean, the word computer is the Latin think together, right? So it's like you're thinking together; I mean, a social network I think extends people's very real social capacity. I mean, you hear all these approximations. I mean, there's this famous Dunbar's number: humans have the capacity to maintain empathetic relationships with about 150 people. Communities, about 150 people. I think Facebook extends that. Evidence of that, by the way, do you see certain things that stop at 150, um, naturally when people sign up? The average amount of friends that they get is around 150, but then over time it can expand, and you can keep in touch and stay in touch with many more people.

So I think it's like... so given that, um, I actually think one of the lessons from that is like do something that's fundamental, right? I mean, I think a lot of people and a lot of the companies that I see are operating on small problems, right? And, um, and it's cool if you want to be an entrepreneur and solve... and what you're primarily trying to do is build a company and solve some tangible problem, but I think that the most interesting things operate on these phenomena in the world which are really just fundamental to how humans or the world operate.

So what you did was something that was fundamental for a small market and then you just expand the market from beyond Harvard students to everyone, but Harvard students are sufficiently like other people. It was, yeah, it was fundamental for me, right? It's like I felt this need really acutely; I really wanted this. And, um, so yeah, and then I think it just, I mean, that's one of the things that I think we were lucky about.

And, um, and kind of the expansion of the market was that, um, it turned out that this wasn't something that was just for college students; almost everyone in the world has friends and family and want to stay in touch with those people, so it ended up being a pretty ubiquitous service. In retrospect, this is a bit of a controversial question, perhaps, but in retrospect do you think Myspace had a chance?

Since once you started and you got all the college students, I mean the college students are arguably like the center of gravity socially, right? You own all the college students. It feels like, you know, from the point you start expanding out of Harvard, Myspace might... might not have known it; maybe you didn't even know it, but it seems like in retrospect they were doomed. You know, I don't see it that way actually; they could have won.

No, it's not about winning and losing; it's about doing something that's valuable, right? And there are more than one... more than one social network? Not really; there are many. There... I mean, my view of the world is that almost every product in the category is going to get transformed and reimagined to be social. So there were things that Myspace did that Facebook has never done.

Um, you know, Myspace, I think, was a much better service early on for meeting new people, right? Facebook was never primarily about meeting new people; it was about staying connected with the people that you knew and, um, kind of mapping out the real relationships that existed. Now, I think part of the issue is they saw us growing, and they felt threatened by that and tried to copy what we were doing, and that's like... you're never going to win that way, right?

I mean, it's... I think of all these interesting social services and apps that are getting built today. I mean, think about all the new apps that you guys install on your phones. Um, there are so many interesting things, and, you know, I mean, eight out of the top ten iOS apps plug into Facebook. Fifty percent of the top 400 apps plug into Facebook. They're all kind of socially integrated in these ways.

Um, but companies that are getting started now that are just trying to copy the stuff that the other companies are doing just aren't... aren't successful. By the way, how are we doing for time? Is there anybody in charge of time? 12:27. 12:27? What time do we start? A few more minutes? Alright, we'll ask you a few more questions.

Um, so do you think... do you think Myspace could have survived if they had gone off into some marginal territory? Like I think that there is a real value in the world; people have a fundamental need, I think, to stay connected with the people they know. And I think people have many fundamental needs to meet new people and expand their horizons as well, and that's never been the primary problem that Facebook is trying to solve.

And, um, I think it's something that we can do; um, it's something that someone else could do using our platform or that someone else could do building it independently. And, um, you know, I never bought the music thing for Myspace, so, I mean, they kind of always say that they were a music service; I'm not sure that... why did they do that? I don't know; you have to ask them.

But maybe they counted on bands to spam their fans or something like that; that's a powerful force in the world. Um, so before we go, I want to ask you about how you ended up out here. Um, do you... what was... what was the sort of, how did you end up in that house in Palo Alto? Was it something you decided at the last minute?

Um, I don't actually remember. Um, you know, I remember bits of the story, but, you know, so I first, I wrote the first version of Facebook January of 2004, right, and released it in February. And, um, the reason why I did it in January was was because at the time Harvard had this intercession thing. Um, it's kind of weird, and I think that they don't have reading period anymore. I think they've changed it; so now, um, now I... yeah, well, you know, now that because they try to kick out everyone who starts anything interesting there, but, um, but that's... um, but, um, I think that they're actually trying to change that, but, um, it is striking.

Um, the... so now they've made it I think so finals are, um, are before you go away for holidays. But they had this thing before where in January, um, you basically just have this dead month where you could study for finals. I was like, all you could study for finals? St, hypothetically, you wanted to? You could study for finals. Um, I wondered when I saw it was started in January; it was started in reading period, and it was because you had this time where you weren't too busy with stuff.

Yeah, although I actually, um, I probably should have been studying. There's this other story that I think is very funny, which is, um, I was taking this course, Rome of Augustus, and it was, it was one of the core curriculum classes that we had, and the final was, um, the, there these pieces of art that you study throughout the class, and then they give you some, um, on the finals, they show you some of the pieces of art, and you have to write about the historical significance of them.

And, you know, I hadn't really done much of the reading in the class; I mostly just spent my time programming and, um, building stuff that, that I enjoyed. And, you know, I could have used reading period to, to study for this, but instead, I, I spent it reading building Facebook. So instead, what I did was I hacked together this website where I, I went and downloaded from, from the course website the 200 or so images that were going to be potentially on the final, and I just built this very simple, um, page site where it showed one of the images, and then you could contribute what you thought was significant about it, and then you could see what other people thought was significant about it.

And then I, um, and then you could go to next, and it would pull up a random one, and, um, and then I emailed it to the class list, and I was like, hey guys, I built this study tool. Um, if anyone would find this interesting, and everyone just populated, um, this thing for me, and it was wonderful. And, um, that, the professor after that, um, think mentioned that the grades on the final had never been higher before. So, um, [Music] so, so anyhow, so yeah, so I built, um, I, I built the first version in January, some of the time I was at Harvard, supposed to be studying.

I actually went and visited a couple of friends, one who was at Stanford, and one who is out at Caltech. And, um, at the time, um, I had never really been out to California before. And you went in January? In January. And what did you think? The weather was pretty nice? I remember, you know, coming in to the, like, I flew into SFO and was driving down 101, and I saw these buildings for all these companies, like, wow, this is where these technologies... these technology companies come from. This is amazing.

And, um, you know, and then I was just like, oh, the weather also is awesome. And I, I remember I'd been at Harvard for a freshman year, and then I stayed there for the summer, and then sophomore year. So by the time that sophomore summer kind of came around, my friends and I were just like, okay, well, let's, let's go somewhere else, right? And, um, let's rent a place in California. So we decided to get a place in, in Palo Alto, and the idea at the time wasn't that we were, we actually were not thinking about moving to California or dropping out; the actually, the actual thought that had crossed that, that was in our mind was it would be neat to be around some of these other great companies that are getting built.

One day, maybe we'll find something that we'll build a company out of, but surely this isn't it. And, um, so we, so we went out to California, and, um, and we just... I remember this conversation where one day Dustin pulled me aside and was like, you know, we’re getting to have a lot of users, and um, we're, we are having an increasing number of servers; we have no ops guy, right? So we're the ops guy, and um, and this was before kind of EC2, right?

So you didn’t have to... so you had to do more to manage, manage your own servers at that point. And she’s like, you know, this is really hard. Um, I don't think that we can do this and take a full course load, um, so let's... so Harvard has this policy where you can take as much time as you want off from school. So, um, why don't we just take one term off and then just try to get it under control and build the railings that way? Um, we can go back for spring semester and run it more autonomously, and it'll grow, and we'll be able to run it more autonomously, so we did that.

Um, and, and of course, we raised money from Peter Thiel, but we told him the plan, right? And, and kind of explained... what, you told him you might go back to school? Yeah, and I think he didn't believe us, um, but you know... smart knew my life is just this long history of people thinking I was going to drop out well before I did. Um, but, um, but so then, you know, spring term came along, and, you know, we hadn't quite built the tooling and automation, so, you know, let's take another term off.

And then finally, at some point, we just figured that we were... that we were out there, but by then, I mean, we had, you know, millions of users. So you didn't definitely decide not to go back to school until you had millions of users? Oh yeah, yeah. Wow. Hey, I think I could still go back. Harvard has this policy where you can go back for as long as you want. Whatever their policy was, I'm sure they'd been the rules in your case.

Alright, are we... are we done? Are we over? Is there anybody watching the time? Keep going! Well, we can't have to go to... Mark has a wedding he has to go to. I do; it's actually the guy who I, um, who I said before I used to go out to pizza with him every almost every night. We were doing our CS problem sets with; he's getting married right after this, so I have to go and run off to that. Um, but thank you guys.