Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013

You know I came out here earlier and they didn't clap as loud, so it's pretty obvious why they were clapping loud this time. That was for you. Um, all right, I don't have any songs for you. I just came in a few minutes ago, and Jack was here playing a song. Like, what's going on in here? He can pull that off; I can't. Maybe next year.

Um, so I wanted to, I know it's probably hard to remember what it was like way, way back in the beginnings of Facebook, but that's where these guys are in the beginnings. So I'm going to ask you questions about the early years, right? Um, which also have the advantage that you don't have to worry about saying bad things as a public company because we're just talking about ancient history, right?

Um, so I wonder if you remember when you sat down to write Facebook during that reading period. What was the first thing you wrote? Like, when you had enough code to test something to see if it worked, what was it? What did you test?

I don't remember then what the first thing was that I wrote, but actually, the first code for Facebook started way before then, right? So I, like probably a lot of you guys, I just built a lot of stuff for myself all throughout my childhood. I built games that I wanted to play. I built a music player that I wanted. I tried to build stuff that I really wanted for myself, right?

And I was young. I wasn't building very high-quality stuff. Um, it was just stuff that I wanted, not for anyone else. And then when I got to college, I started wanting to build products that would let me get insight into the community around me and let me connect with the people around me. That had the property that you can't actually just build something that only you use; if you want to be able to connect with people around you, you have to start building software that other people are going to use as well.

So I actually—

You mean like FaceMash?

Uh, well before that! You know, it's actually one of the, um, it's that stupid movie. Um, makes everyone think that FaceMash was like this critical thing, uh, but actually, a lot earlier than that, in my sophomore year, one of the first things that I built that was kind of like this was actually called CourseMatch. I don't think we've talked about this that much in any of these startup schools.

It was um, I was trying to figure out what classes I wanted to take in my sophomore fall, and I wanted to see what other people who had taken the Cs classes that I'd taken wanted to take, and what my friends were planning on taking and what they'd taken in the past, but there was no database like that that was out there. So I thought, all right, well, how can I do this?

So I went and I wrote this little script that scraped the course catalog and let people put in what classes they wanted, and I called it the Course Graph. And, um, and that was actually the first time. Yeah, I mean, it was—it was actually, I made the mistake of running the website from a laptop in my dorm room, and um, my desk was right next to the bathroom, and there was like constantly steam pouring out of that from people showering. So the laptop actually fried, and I lost that one after like a few weeks of it running.

But that was the first time that I'd uh ever really set up a production, you know, Apache server or MySQL server or a lot of that stuff. And then, you know, a lot of those things—you know, then when I went on to build later stuff, I had those lessons, and I knew that I could set those things up quickly. So those were just building blocks on top of which to build future things.

Did people put their classes in it? Did you use it to decide what to take?

Yeah, no, it was like a thousand or 2,000 people out of the—it was like 6,000 people at Harvard. Yeah, so I mean, it worked fine. Um, it was actually really interesting. People spent so much time just clicking through the links of um, people to see what classes they were in, and then in the classes they clicked on people who—the roster of the people. It was just, it was—I thought it was going to be interesting, and I wanted to solve this problem, but it was just way more compelling.

And you know, part of my theory at the time was, um, you know, I looked at all the other types of content that were out there on the internet, right? It's like you could search for any music or news or content or reference material that you wanted, but part of my theory at the time was that people were really missing from the internet, right? And there were no services like that. And you know, that's why I built some of these services that went in that direction.

But I still think people are largely missing from a lot of the software that we build, which is why I'm focused on building this development platform today as part of Facebook, so that way the next generation of software that the industry builds can just be more human. So every app that people build has this sort of additional dimension now where you can sort of see what other people are doing too. We're trying to go in that direction.

So you knew by the time you started Facebook that if you made some website, you could get thousands of people to show up to it?

Well, I—didn't have a choice. I knew that if I wanted to do this, that I had to build something that I could—that would get people to use it. I didn't know if I could actually do that.

So, but it must have been a little bit surprising that thousands of people showed up on something that wasn't even intended to draw thousands of people. You could probably do it again, right?

Well, yeah! And then I did a few more, and um, I was really focused on this idea of channeling a community's energy to build some kind of shared asset, whether it's, you know, the Course Graph or, um, you know, ultimately, um, Facebook was a good example of this.

I mean, one of my favorite stories from college that I actually think I've told at startup school before is I built the first version of Facebook during reading period, which is basically this two or three-week period that Harvard—I don't know if they still give this, but I think they stopped. But shocking!

Well, you know, both Microsoft and Facebook started during reading period, yeah! So Harvard likes canceling things that work.

Um, but so basically, it's this period during January before your finals where you can ostensibly study for classes, for uh, your finals, and I took that period to write the first version of Facebook. I don't think I'd written any code for that project directly, um, until really January, and then, um, by the end of January, I was basically done with it.

But then one day I woke up a couple of days before this um, final for this class that I was taking called the Rome of Augustus. It was this, um, lit in arts class, and the class was all about learning the historical significance of a bunch of pieces of art that were there.

And for the final, they were just going to show some pieces of art from the class, and uh, you had to write an essay on the significance of them, and I—I hadn't really gone to class all term. I just like programmed, and then during reading period when I should have been learning this, I programmed. And, um, so I was pretty screwed, right? There was no way that I was going to cover all this material.

So I just went to the course website, downloaded all the images, and I made a little website that basically would randomly show into the images and would let you contribute your notes of what you thought was reasonable or what was important about that photo that someone else had taken by going to class.

What's up?

Yeah, that other people learned through hard work, and um, and then I sent this out to the course email list. I was like, "Hey guys, I built a study tool," and within an hour, the whole thing was just populated with all the information that we needed to take the class, or to take the final.

So I think I did pretty well in the final. I don't remember the exact grade, but tell us about some real-world system you have hacked to your advantage.

Um, what's up? That—that's an answer—that's a question on the YC application form. We actually ask for people having done a trick like that, um, that would get our attention incidentally if you ever want to die, Y.C.

Um, well, it's funny, you know, the first couple of times I met Mark after all this time evaluating startup founders, I can't turn it off. So I'm like—the first couple of times I met Mark, there would be this like pro—this side process running in my head saying, "Accept him," accepting it, and I would have to say, "Stop it! It's too late."

Um, well now we get to work together on other things. Um, all right, no, I love it! I love it!

Um, so one of the things I—we talked about last year was how when you first launched Facebook, the first other colleges you expanded to were ones that had competing services. So I didn't ask you at the time, but I wonder now, why did you win? What was it that Facebook had that the competing services didn't?

I think it was just this focus on real identity and the connections between people. But it goes back to this theme where before Facebook, on the internet there were—you could find a lot of information about a lot of different types of content, but the thing that we as people care the most about, which is other people, right?

It's—we're just wired that way. Um, it wasn't there. And if you think about it, the reason is that, you know, that—that information about people isn't just out there on the internet to be indexed by some search engine, right? You can't just send a web crawler around and learn what's going on with people.

Um, you have to build tools that give people the power to share that content themselves, and um, and that stuff didn't exist. And if you go back, you know, most of the way that people interacted online was anonymous, right?

And the idea at the time was that it was pretty scary to put your name, um, in real identity online without the right privacy controls and without kind of the right community infrastructure. So I think that that's a lot of what we built was a framework where people would be comfortable sharing in that way.

And were people able to share less on these competing services? There were three universities you mentioned: Stanford and Columbia.

Yeah, they each had different things. I think some of them were just—they gave people less ways to express content about themselves. Um, none of them I think had a concept of connections, right?

So one of the things that, you know, if you think about friending, you could friend people. Yeah, and if you think about friending today, one of the reasons why it's important is because you get the person's content in your news feed, right? And there was no news feed back then, right?

So a lot of the reason that friending was good was just because you could put someone on your profile and say that you were connected to them. So just like people were more fascinated than intuitively it seemed like they should have been about looking and clicking through the classes that people were taking, a lot of people also just wanted to see who other people knew.

There was nothing like that that existed.

So you had friending from the beginning?

Oh yeah! That was a really critical piece. So the missing real identity and connection—they had the nodes of the social graph but not the arcs.

Um, well there was that, and I think there was less emphasis on real identity in the community. So some of these communities, you know, just like you— made it so that people could sign up with a pseudonym, which is fine.

I mean, I think that there are lots of services that are good with pseudonyms, but if you're talking about making out a real community, then, um, then you want that.

Why does it have its drawbacks?

Have you ever seen the comments on Hacker News? I mean, I think if people were talking under their own names, they might be a bit more civilized, but sometimes it actually—it goes both ways, though, right?

I mean, a lot of the advantage of that is that people can be very critical, right? It's if you're always talking into your real name, it—there's often a social penalty for being critical. So, um, it is more civilized, I think, but that may not always be the most productive thing. So you want to balance these things.

Um, at the moment I envy you.

Um, so well, we can talk after this about getting hack ConEd. I know what you're about to say. Yes, the devil you know or the devil you don't.

Um, okay, see, the key is don't only use Facebook Connect, right? It's some people make use of Facebook and Twitter.

Well, yeah! Or Facebook and email or whatever else you want. Um, Twitter's fine too. I mean, it's—but you want to use two. You want to—

All right, now this is a hypothetical question. Um, so if you hadn't started Facebook, like, for example, if Harvard had already canceled reading period, um, and you were—or had actually kicked me out, right? Or they kicked you out for FaceMash.

You know, you asked this question before about would I have started Facebook without FaceMash. About the only thing that I got from FaceMash was I met my wife because of it. Because my Harvard said that they were going to kick me out, and my friends really thought that they were going to kick me out.

So they planned this going-away party for me, and I actually met my wife at that party. Um, so they didn't even wait for the ad board to decide before they had the going-away party. They were so sure!

Yeah, my friends were just like completely positive that I was going to get kicked out of school. Actually, you know, not only that, but my family was pretty confident that I was going to either get kicked out or drop out of school too. Before I started college, my little sister bet me that she would finish college before me, and my mom later told me that she always knew I was going to leave college. I was like, "Oh, thanks, Mom!"

So here's my hypothetical question: if you hadn't started Facebook, um, there would probably be something like Facebook now.

Oh yeah! Would it have—would it have to have been something that started out as a network for college students? Was that thermal so powerful that the winner would have had to be one of these college things, or could MySpace have sort of morphed and grown and—

You know, I don't—yeah, I don't think it had to be a college thing. You know, one of my earliest memories from Facebook was I—I used to get Pizza almost every night with, uh, one of my friends who I did my computer science problem sets with, and we used to talk about technology and where we saw the world going, and I remember one of our conversations right after I’d launched Facebook was about how I was really excited to offer this service for our community, but that one day clearly someone was going to build this for the world, right?

And it hadn't even crossed my mind that maybe we would be the ones to do it because from my perspective, it's like, all right, we're just college students. What do we know about building software that hundreds of millions of people will use, you know? Clearly, this is going to be something that, you know, Microsoft or Google or Yahoo or someone like that who builds these services that that tons of people use, uh, is going to do it.

And you know when was the point when you realized you were going to do it? Like how many—how many schools did you have before you realized this was a—

It was probably later on when we went outside of college, but even up to the point where you had hundreds of colleges, you still thought some big company was going to come along and do this better?

Well, not necessarily the college part, but I didn't know that we were going to be the people building the community to kind of connect everyone, right? So it's—

Um, in retrospect, though, it was pretty obvious.

No, no, not at all! You know, I actually—I spent a bunch of time analyzing and reflecting on why it was that we were even able to do it. Because all reason suggests that we shouldn't have been able to do it, right? Because all these other companies had way more engineering power and um, and servers and time and money and all this stuff.

And I actually think that this is a pretty instructive thing for anything that you want to go do, because this is the same property that's going to be true for any of you guys that start is that someone else is going to have more resources and be able to do it.

The reason why I think we actually ended up being the ones doing it is because we just cared way more about it than everyone else, right? So there were always projects at some of these other companies that were these hobbies, but we always thought that it was this really important thing and really just like felt in our gut and our heart that we wanted to do it.

And you know, early on there were always these skeptics saying that, oh, this can't be a business. We didn't actually care that much about it being a business early on. Uh, but a lot of the reason why bigger companies didn't invest in it was because it wasn't clear that there was a model that would work for it. It seemed like a bad idea.

Yeah, and I actually think that that's true for a lot of the best ideas, right? Is that it's not that someone else can't do it; they actually can, and the odds are stacked against you. But I think often that belief in the fact that you just care so much about what you're doing is the only thing that kind of drives you to do it.

And you know, to be honest, that kind of drives me to this day. I mean, one of the big emphasis points for the company right now is Internet.org, and you know, for a while we had this rallying cry of can we connect a billion people?

Um, and you know, when we started talking about that, we thought that was crazy, right? It was way bigger than any service in the world that had been built, and you know, it was ten digits long, right? It's like a—you know, it just—it felt crazy. We'd never get to that. But then the thing is, as we started actually getting closer to that, we took a step back and we're like, all right, well, our mission isn't actually to get one in seven people in the world to be connected; it's we want to connect everyone.

So it's um, it's a big issue that only around a third of the people in the world have access to the internet, and that's something that we think that we can do something about, and similar to early Facebook, we don't—there's no business model around this.

I mean, all the people who have all the money in the world—I mean, it's not necessarily a fair thing—are already the people who are on Facebook, right? It's in the first, you know, seventh of the world.

Um, but we just believe really strongly, it's like, this is what we are here to do. This is what our company cares about. I care about it, the team cares about it, our culture cares about it.

So we're just going to keep pushing on it, and I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it's kind of irrational at the time.

Um, but so it—it kind of selects for the people who care the most about it doing it.

Do you think there's anything about you, like a personal quality of yours besides sort of basic smartness and determination that made you well-suited to work on this project?

I realize this requires some introspection.

Yeah, I actually think determination is probably the biggest piece. You know, it's um, so many things go wrong when you're starting a company, and often I think people ask, you know, what mistakes should you avoid making?

And you know, my answer to that question is don't even bother trying to avoid mistakes because you're going to make tons of mistakes, right? And the um, the important thing is actually learning quickly from whatever mistakes you make and not giving up, right?

And I mean, there there are things every single year of Facebook's existence that could have killed us or made it so that it just seemed like moving forward and making a lot of progress just seemed intractable. But you just kind of bounce back, and you learn, and um, nothing is impossible. You just have to kind of keep running through the walls.

So the biggest mistake is the sort of meta-mistake of letting a mistake demoralize you.

Um, do you think Facebook—no, no one knows better.

Yeah, do you think Facebook had a rougher time? Like, do you think it ran into more obstacles early on than typical startups? Because now you've known, you know, a lot of other people who've started startups, and you've heard all the ghastly stories about what goes on behind the scenes.

Do you think it was more of a show or less or about normal?

Probably more, yeah. And I mean, part of the reason—well, part of the reason was because I knew nothing when I got started, right? You have to remember I was 19 years old when I started Facebook, right? So I—

I mean probably like the same age or younger than most of you guys. I think you would be young for this audience actually, and um, I knew nothing—nothing about business at all, right?

I didn't even think that I was starting a company. I actually remember when I first came out here for the summer with Dustin because we wanted to learn from Silicon Valley companies.

I remember driving, you know, up the 101 and seeing all these great companies and thinking to myself, oh wow, these are such amazing companies. Maybe one day I'll start a company and I'd already started Facebook, right? And, and it hadn't occurred to me that that was actually, you know—

So, um, how did you learn?

How did you learn?

From a lot of the people around me, but there are so many mistakes that just come from not—I mean like I really knew so little at the time. I mean like when Peter Thiel came in to invest, one thing that he demanded was that all of the founders be on vesting schedules, and um, I didn't even know what a vesting schedule was. I'd never heard of that, right?

So I mean part of the early conflict that I had with um, with Eduardo, who's one of our founders who then left, was he was at Harvard with us. We kind of decided, okay, if we started a company, we divide the equity up this way. We hadn't heard about vesting schedules, and then he just bounced; he never moved out to California with us.

So um, so Peter was like, oh, all you guys have to be on vesting schedules. I was like, oh, now what do we do?

Right?

So um, and but it's fine! I mean, it's like that mistake probably cost me billions of dollars, but it's fine. You just—you move forward, and um, and you can't—it doesn't matter, right?

I mean, you just kind of keep pushing forward, and that's how it goes.

Um, how—how did you learn, though? Like you—you start out—that's good! You can do it, Robert!

Um, uh, um, so you start out as a 19-year-old, right? And you have this website that's just like going through the roof. Ron was talking earlier about how very early on that the graphs just were going up very steeply, um, and you had to learn how to create this organization.

You know you had to learn how to be a manager. That's the next phase after you raise money and you have something that's growing. How did you learn how to manage people?

Well, through a lot of mistakes. I mean, um, I don't think anyone is like naturally good at hiring out of the box, right? It's like you have to learn in each role we probably went through multiple iterations before landing on a balance of a person that made sense.

And—and the problem is made even harder by the fact that you don't need the same thing at each stage, right? So it's a moving target as well.

But eventually—it's not just hiring though, you have to somehow lead a group of people and get them all to work together, right? It's very hard.

Yeah, that's what you do now, right? You don't program much probably, right? You spend all your time managing people.

Well, only for fun! Now you're a management expert?

No, absolutely not!

You must be, right?

Yeah, try telling that to my team. Um, they'll um—but how—how did you learn? Was there anyone who taught you or any books?

Well, you just have to throw yourself in, right? So you have to—so I have, um, you know, I've developed a few heuristics over time that I think are are simple enough that the organization can internalize.

So in terms of hiring, you know, everyone says hire good people, right? No one wants to hire like a reasonable person. Um, you know, you want to hire like a really good person, but then the question is how do you—like what's the right heuristic for determining if someone's really good?

So over time what I figured out was that the only actual way to let someone analyze whether someone was really good was if they would work for that person.

So I don't think that needs to recurse too many levels down in the organization, but I basically think that that's like a—that's a really good heuristic, right?

And I believe that, I mean for if you look at my management team today, I mean if we were in an alternate universe and I hadn't started the company, it would be an honor to work for any of these people, and I think if you if you build a company that has kind of those values rather than just saying, oh I want to hire, you know, the best person I can find, or whatever, if you hold yourself to that standard, then I think you'll build a pretty strong company.

There are other things around management that you just kind of have to throw yourself into in different ways as well. I used to be really terrified of public speaking, um, to the point where when I did all-hands, which at the time were like 10 or 15 people, I had to sit down because I was so afraid. And at the time a lot of people—which is ironic because I'm still sitting—but um, not-not because I'm afraid, just because it's more comfortable.

And so what I did was, um, I basically I I threw myself into some of this stuff and you know a bunch of schools invited me to come speak and what I I did was I I accepted some of those invitations even though I had no real goal of doing that except for desensitizing myself.

And I went up to give a speech without having prepared anything. And if you do that a few times, you stop being afraid really quickly. And 'cause I mean what's the worst thing that can happen, you know?

Um, I think a survey says that more Americans are afraid of public speaking than death, and um, it's so you know just throw yourself in. You get over this stuff.

I remember the first talk you ever gave at startup school, and I think it was one of these—the way you describe that you went with no preparation, right?

And you know, actually, I—that but thank you. What the worst thing that can happen? You can say something off the cuff that gets like taken by the Press like a football and thrown around and gets you in—that's F—

I actually—I actually did prepare for that one. I don't have that excuse, but the fact that, um, it was—did all—did all that this practice did was desensitize me? It didn't actually make me good at public speaking as this—this is proof of—

Do you like managing people?

Um, you know, if you work with people that you like then it's wonderful, right? And because I—one definition that I have for uh a good team is a group of people that makes better decisions as a whole than would individuals make as a sum of the parts.

And um, when you're—I think most smart people like learning, right? And I mean, that's like one of the thrills of starting a company, right, is you're just—the learning curve can be so steep, and um, if you can set up a team dynamic where you're constantly learning from the people around you then I mean what's better, right?

It's these are the people I wake up every morning and I want to I want to go learn from and work from.

Is that one of your heuristics for hiring people too, to like hire people that you learn from?

Yeah!

And when building a team you want it to—you want to think about the dynamics so that way you can maintain this property that the team makes better decisions as a group than any individual would.

How when you first started, like back in that house in Palo Alto, you were a startup founder, right? So how—

I didn't know it yet!

Well what was your mental model of a startup founder? Where did it come from? Did it—was it Bill Gates? You know, or Steve Jobs? Did it come from reading books or Peter Thiel or Sean or Johan Parker? I mean, where did it come from?

The thing that was kind of interesting was there's this culture in Silicon Valley that kind of makes startups seem glamorous, and I never really believed that, right? I never had a goal of starting a startup, and my goal when I realized that I had a company was to get it to be a good company as quickly as possible, right?

And kind of get out of what you'd call the risky startup phase where you are just like constantly about to die and where you could get to a point where you actually do some interesting things and make a lot more interesting bets, and um, so I don't know, I never read a lot of the literature on this, and I mean maybe if I had then I wouldn't have made so many mistakes, but um, so I don't know if like if learning for me is the right way to go on this, but I mean—but it did—I think your model must have come from somewhere though, even if it was—even if it was unintentional, right?

Like, were you influenced by Peter Thiel or Sean—

Well, yes, I was influenced by all these people once I met them. I actually I hadn't really heard of Peter Thiel before, yeah, right?

Yeah, but I mean he was massively influential on my thinking, right? I mean I like a lot of the um, the early lessons that I took on how to think about strategy came from Peter and Sean, and um, I did pay a lot of attention when I was growing up to Microsoft.

I thought—I mean I grew up you know using, you know, Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95, and I just thought that those were like the most unbelievable things, and um, since they are!

Yeah, they really, really were awesome, right? Um, well I—I don't know if you meant that positively, but I did!

And, and I thought you know building this ecosystem was really neat, and that kind of inspired me, right, in the way that they built a platform. I kind of thought okay—well maybe one day you know that the tools that I'm building can be part of a broader ecosystem as well, and um, I think that that had kind of gotten lost from the Valley by the time that I got around to setting up Facebook as a company.

I mean Google and Apple to that point um hadn't really created platforms. They went on to create much better platforms than anything that was created on desktop, um, with their mobile operating systems, but that was pretty influential for me.

So was that idea of one day making Facebook into a platform sort of implicit all along? Was it always something you were mulling over, or was it something that occurred to you after you had all these people you know talking to one another?

Well, turning Facebook into a platform was after that, but the idea that there should be some social platform was pretty early on, right? So between you know CourseMatch and the art of Augustus thing and FaceMash and like all these things when I was at it kind of became clear to me that a lot of the software that we use should have people at the center of it, right?

And people want to learn about people—that's like a really core thing um, in our psychology. So I thought that you know whether there was a central social network kind of at the core of that, or just like some kind of social libraries or API or something, that there needed to be something that U made it so that was like a common framework that um everyone could use to develop.

You mentioned earlier that um Peter Thiel and Shawn Parker both influenced your ideas about strategy. Can you remember a particular strategic insight that you had early on?

And it's probably, you know, the statute of limitations for competition has probably passed now. There's probably stuff you can say about some insight that you had early on, and you thought to yourself, "Aha! Nobody else knows this except us, but we have this—this great trick." Do you remember any of them?

Well, Peter Thiel was really focused on effects, and he had this model that I think is right for making decisions that as the complexity of the company grows every day you're going to be faced with a hundred things that you could potentially go do and your job is to pick the one thing that actually matters because out of those hundred things it's really only actually going to be one or two things that actually matter.

And that was pretty informative to me at the time because I had intuitively like I had a lot of some self-direction intuitively, but as soon as I started getting all these people around me, um, who all had reasonable perspectives on things, it was very hard for me to balance that, and um, Peter was always very useful for that.

Um, we were focused—he was good at saying here’s the one thing that matters. Like focus on the one thing that mattered.

Well, partially that and partially just the meta-lesson of figure out the one thing that matters and do that. But he also—

Do you remember what the one thing that mattered was?

Like connecting everyone as quickly as possible because I mean Network effects were a massively important part of this.

One of the stories—

You say connecting everyone as quickly as possible; you don't mean specifically getting more signups. You mean getting people to friend one another faster.

Yeah. How did you do that?

Um, well, we built a lot of tools to enable people to do what they already wanted to, right? You can't like push uphill on this stuff, right?

It's um, we were solving a problem that people had, and we just needed to remove as much friction as possible.

But there was a pretty early, you know, funny sequence where there was actually this company in 2005 that got started, um, that was called College Facebook. It was like an exact clone of us and it even had the same name, right?

And um, and their strategy because we started at Harvard and then tried to branch out to schools that we thought would have dense social connections with Harvard so we could build this network. Their goal was they wanted to start in places that we weren't, right?

So they started on the West Coast and in the South when we started in the Northeast, and they tried to build up this network of different schools, and—and it was just this race for a while, and um eventually Boulder—Boulder Seattle, yeah.

And it's—I mean we just took this stuff really seriously and I remember Dustin just took it so personally, right? It's like anytime they launch at some school that we weren't at, we had this concept that we actually still have at the company today called lockdown, which is whenever any other company gets ahead of us on something that we think is strategic to us.

Um, back then lockdown meant we literally did not leave the house until we had addressed the problem.

Now it's a little looser of an interpretation; we rally everyone—theice—but as close to that as we can get.

Um, so, and you know now the funny thing is inside Facebook, um, you know because we have a lot of different initiatives teams kind of do this themselves, right?

And—and just decide, it's like, "All right, there's like some competitor that has something that we um feel like we really need, like we're going into lockdown to get this thing because we're not going to, you know, let College Facebook get ahead of us."

So in retrospect, could you have completely ignored College Facebook and it wouldn't have made any difference?

I don't know; it's a good question.

Well, don't you think like you would have just eventually spread to those schools and killed them?

I mean in theory, I think they didn't do a perfect job copying us. You know one of the things that's interesting is that there are some countries where folks have made such good clones of Facebook that it has been very hard for us to grow, and Russia is the biggest example, right?

So VKontakte, these guys are just like the international Olympiad Computing Computing Olympiad Champions and it's the small team and they like just did like an awesome job cloning Facebook and there are fewer content laws, so they also have um like illegal file downloads and all this stuff and like we just have not been able to beat them.

And um, and it’s um, maybe it's because of the illegal file downloads, and it's—I so you should add file downloads!

Well we try not to break the law, but it's um, the—I mean we’re growing fine, right?

And it's like linear growth and we're we're I think slowly making a lot of progress and I'm pretty sure we'll pass them eventually, but it's been literally like almost ten years, right since we got started with Facebook and we still have not um beaten them in Russia.

So it is possible that if the College Facebook folks had done better, um and had gone faster then maybe, maybe—

No, no, but like they went the speed they did; that wasn't affected by your lockdowns. I'm just wondering like maybe those lockdowns were unnecessary because we always advise people basically just ignore competition, right?

I do think that it's definitely possible to over-rotate on competitors, but one caveat that I would say I think people tend to worry too much about strategic competitors who are doing something that's related, but clones I think actually end up being a pretty big nuisance, right?

So there—there are like there are these whole companies now in Europe that like all they do is just clone companies that have been founded in the US and other places and try to bring them to Europe and have network effects, and it's like a pain in the ass, right?

And I—I don't think—um, so I actually think you do want to internationalize and pay attention to that stuff fairly early because those things are really annoying once they get lodged in.

Okay, I think we have one minute left, so I'm going to ask you one more question.

Um, it seems like the most successful founders are are sort of obsessed, like they're a little bit—they care a little bit too much about certain things, right?

Like Steve Jobs cared a little bit too much about how perfect the edges of some polygon were, right? What is it that you care too much about?

Connecting everyone.

No, seriously, if you think about—I mean, it's like this aesthetic sense of the world that I have is that you can—the communities of people can channel their energy to do great things and having connections between people is the infrastructure for the world to do that.

And you know, that's why at each step along the way when there was always all this uncertainty about you know whether it would be profitable or whether it would make sense or be good or whatever to do these things, um we always were doing it because we just cared more.

And I mean to this day, I mean you could—you could say that that was a startup thing, but it isn't because I—now we connect more than a billion people! But I mean we're pouring tons of money and resources into connecting people who can't even afford internet access, right?

So I mean that's like there's no way that that's going to be profitable in the near term or medium term, but we're doing it because we think it’s the right thing to do, and over the long term I do think that there's something there, and it's going to be fundamentally important for the world and maybe we'll get rewarded, maybe not, but we just really care, so it's a movement and Facebook the company is sort of a subset of it.

Well, all right, you guys, I think we're done. Are we done? We done?

All right, thank you very much, Mark Zuckerberg! [Applause]