Interviewer:
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 projects that you can take away from the early days of Facebook?
Mark:
Yeah. I always think that you should start with the problem that you're trying to solve in the world and not start with deciding that you want to build a company. And the best companies that get built are things that are trying to drive some kind of social change even if it's just local in one place more than starting out because you want to make a bunch of money or have a lot of people working for you or build some company in some way. So I always think that this is kind of a perverse think about Silicon Valley in a way, which is that 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 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 really delivering a lot of value for people, and that's, I think, how the best companies end up getting made.
Interviewer:
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?
Mark:
Yeah. I think one of the hardest parts for me was actually when Yahoo offered to buy the company for a lot of money, because up until that point, that was the turning point in the company where before that every day we'd just come in and kind of do what we thought was the right next thing to do. We'd open to more schools. We opened to high school and beyond schools and launched more photos because that's what seemed like the next thing that we needed to do to help people express themselves and understand more what was going on around them. But then Yahoo came in with this really meaningful offer, a billion dollars for...
Interviewer:
And this was how far into the company?
Mark:
It was a couple of years in, and we had 10 million people using the product at the time, so 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 look at the future and say, "Wow! Is what we're going to build going to actually be so much more meaningful for this?" And that caused a lot of interesting conversations in the company and with our investors, and at the end of that, Dustin and I just decided, "No, we can think that we can actually go connect more than just the 10 million people who are in schools. We can go beyond that and have this really be a successful thing." And we just had to go for it, but that was really stressful because a lot of people really thought that we should sell the company. And for a lot of folks who joined a startup, I feel like at that point I hadn't been very good about communicating that we were trying to go for this mission. We just showed up every day and just kind of did what we thought was the right next thing to do. So for a lot of the folks who joined early on, they weren't really aligned with me. For them, they joined, and being able to sell a company for a billion dollars after a couple years, that was like a home run. And it is a home run, and I think that that's...I get that, but I think that the fact that I didn't communicate very well about what we were trying to do caused this huge tension. And the point that was painful wasn't turning down the offer. It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing. If you look at the management team that we had...
Interviewer:
Did that whole management team leave?
Mark:
The whole management team was gone within about a year after that.
Interviewer:
Did you ever regret that decision in that period? Like, were there times where you were like, "Well, we should have sold"?
Mark:
I got really lucky because not only did what I believed in end up working out, but it ended up working out pretty quickly. Right? So it literally...I think this was in the summer of 2006, and by I think the next month after that, we launched News Feed, which now 10 years looking back at it, is one of the most used products in the world. And then we launched the ability for anyone to sign up, which immediately started growing the community. So within a few months after turning down the offer, I think it was actually pretty clear that it was the right decision. But I think...since then, there have been much harder decisions that we've had to make where sometimes you have to bet on something and either bet the direction of the company or bet billions of dollars on something, and it's not going to be clear whether you're right for 5 or 10 years. And that, I think, actually can end up being much harder than this one.
Interviewer:
That's what I want to talk about next, but before we go there, have you ever thought about selling the company again since?
Mark:
No. After that point...
Interviewer:
That was just...
Mark:
Yeah.
Interviewer:
Got that out of the way. We're going to hire people that want to be here for a long time and...
Mark:
Yeah.
Interviewer:
Cool. Yeah, 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. And I think one thing that Facebook has done incredibly well is figure out what to build 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?
Mark:
I think the key is building a company which is focused on learning as quickly as possible. Companies are learning organisms, and you can make decisions that either make it so that you learn faster or you learn slower. And in a lot of ways building a company is like following the scientific method. You try a bunch of different hypotheses, and if you set up the experiments well, then you kind of learn what to do, and I think that that's an important philosophy. So there are all these different decisions that we make inside the company, everything down to really empowering individual engineers. We invest in this huge testing framework. At any given point in time, there aren't, there's not just one version of Facebook running in the world. There's probably tens of thousands of versions running because engineers here have the power to try out an idea and ship it to maybe 10,000 people or 100,000 people. And then they get a readout on how that version of what they did, whether it was a change to show better content in News Feed or UI change or some new feature, that they get a readout on how that version performed compared to the baseline version of Facebook that we have on everything that we care about, how connected people are, how much people are sharing, and how much they say that they're finding meaningful content, business metrics, like how much revenue we make, and engagement of the overall community. And by running tens of thousands of different experiments and putting the power in people's hands to try out all these different things, you can imagine we'd just make so much more progress than we could if every change had to be approved by me or every idea had to come from management. So I do think that there's something very deep about building this learning culture and moving quickly towards that. That just helps you get ahead over time.