Building a mission and building a business go hand-in-hand. It is true that the primary thing that makes me excited about what we’re doing is the mission, but I also think, from the very beginning, we’ve had this healthy understanding which is that we need to do both.
If you think about companies that were built in Silicon Valley, a lot of them early on were chip companies. And now the companies that are there, like Apple, are much more successful than any of the chip companies were.
My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.
When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.
Of course the Silicon Valley is unique and Berlin is not yet comparable. But of all the different cities that are building a startup infrastructure, Berlin is the one with the most similar energy.
The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.
I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.
The world is changing so quickly, with mobile stuff and different platforms emerging, that I think it’s more likely that the biggest competitor for Facebook is someone that we haven’t heard of. What that means for us is that we should just really stay focused on what we’re doing.
Berlin definitely has one of the most vibrant of the startup scenes that I have seen. Not really just across Europe, but across the whole world in terms of cities. It’s an interesting dynamic.
When I started Facebook from my dorm room in 2004, the idea that my roommates and I talked about all the time was a world that was more open.
People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.
Find that thing you are super passionate about.
Our strategy is very horizontal. We’re trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically we’re trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social whether it’s on the web, or mobile, or other devices.
If you don’t risk anything you risk everything.
When you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress.
Why are most chess masters under 30?
It’s not because of the amount of money. For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people. Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me.
In a lot of ways Berlin is a symbol for me of Facebook’s mission: bringing people together, connecting people and breaking down boundaries.
If Facebook were a country, it would be the 8th most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan.
I don’t hate anybody. The Winklevi aren’t suing me for intellectual property theft. They’re suing me because for the first time in their lives, the world didn’t work the way it was supposed to for them.