Interviewer:
What about the bigger bets, like making a large acquisition or the rollout of News Feed or something like that? How do those decisions work?
Mark:
So I actually think when you do stuff well, you shouldn't have to do big, crazy things, right? So you actually want to evolve in a way where you're working with your community and making steps and learning. So take News Feed, for example. There was a relatively big shift, but it actually had been a couple of years in the making by watching how people were using the service. So when we started off, we didn't have anything like News Feed that showed you updates 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. They'd click on different profiles, hundreds of them, just to, and they'd go through all their friends to see what people had changed, to see what the update was in their friend's day. And we learned from that that people were not just interested in looking up and learning about a person but also understanding the day to day changes. So first we made this product that just showed in order of which of your friends had updated your profile, so that at least told you whose profile to click on. And then the first version of News Feed was really simple. All it did was it basically took the content that people were posting and put it in order on your home page. So I think when things are working well, you use data, and you use the qualitative feedback that you're getting from listening to how your community is using your product to tell you what problems to go solve. And then you basically use intuition to figure out what the solutions to those problems might be, and you test those hypotheses by rolling them out and getting more data and feedback on that, and then that gives you a sense of where to go. When I look at things like... We bought the Oculus team for a lot of money. I actually view that as if we'd done a better job of building up some of the expertise to do some of that stuff internally, then maybe we wouldn't have had to do that, but instead we hadn't done that. And the Oculus team is by far the most talented team working on that problem, so it just made sense to go make this big move. But I actually kind of think as CEO it's your job to not get into a position where you need to be doing these crazy things. Of course it's inevitable over the period of doing stuff, you can't be ahead of everything. So it's better to make big moves and be willing to do that than have pride and not do that and never admit that you could have done something better in the past. But I think when stuff is working well, you're learning incrementally and growing that way.
Interviewer:
Speaking of growing, 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, and so this is something now that I've heard a lot of founders ask about. Could you tell us is that still something you recommend people running companies put in place and how Facebook's worked in the early days?
Mark:
So making it so we could grow faster was I think the most important product feature that we ended up building for Facebook, and the traditional approach to growing and marketing is you have a communications group or you have a marketing team, and you buy ads. I think that there's sometimes there's a place for that, especially when you're trying to communicate something and get a message out. But if you're actually trying to grow a product, I think often the best levers for doing that are within the product themselves and getting people in your community who enjoy what you're doing to evangelize that to their friends and getting that to happen efficiently as efficiently as possible. So there's no magic in the growth group that we built that other people can't replicate. It's just being very vigorous with data, investing in data infrastructure so that way you can process all these different experiments and learn what people are trying to tell you and then go invest engineering and actually trying to grow the community because I think that that's the most important feature for a lot of networks.
Interviewer:
And can you tell how much of an impact that group had on the growth rate of Facebook?
Mark:
Yeah. Overall, I think it's been very big. I don't have a number off the top my head, but even just looking at some of these specific features that we've built, like People You May Know, which is one of the important things, again, if you're... Social product isn't that useful if you're not connected to other people when you're using it, so 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.