Good lord this is terrible and the things that were learned and seemed to be normalized by Noah are not applicable to 99% of all individuals starting a company.

First section is about growth:

> “Mark, we’re not profitable. Let’s try selling tickets inside Facebook events,” I pleaded.
> He said no.
> Then he took a dry-erase marker and wrote on the board: GROWTH.
> Mark’s goal was 1 billion users.
> Every idea we’d bring, he’d ask, “Does this help growth or not?”

Putting growth above profitability can only work when you are getting some sort of outside funding. Facebook didn't turn a profit until 2009, which means it was about 5 years of burning through other people's money. That is not sustainable for the almost all individuals who are wanting to start a company now or people who are running smaller companies.

Move Fast:

> At Facebook, it was normal to work 12+ hours a day.

That is just awful and it is painful to think that giving up so much of one's life was the norm there.

> We shipped several updates to the site every day. In comparison, companies like Microsoft would take months to write out product details, discuss them in a lot of meetings, and finally build them.
> As a startup, your biggest advantage against giant companies is speed.

There is a reason why things would take longer at Microsoft, you can't "go fast and break things" when it comes to an operating system or other software that is businesses may rely on for their day to day work. The fact that Noah makes the comparison to Microsoft is concerning since I don't believe that Microsoft had any social network product around the time that Noah worked for Facebook (though I could be wrong). A better comparison would be MySpace, since they were an actual competitor of Facebook's at the time and also worked on comparable products.

Treat Your Employees Well:

Many of the perks that he lists out are designed to ensure that the employee stays at the office as much as possible. It is easy to get your employees to work 12+ hour days when you make it so they don't have to go anywhere to get good tasting food 3 times a day, didn't have to worry about your laundry and would even get money for living very close to the office.

Scratch Your Own Itch:

>At the start, Mark never intended to build a company. He was just trying to help connect people at college.

I'm not really sure how creating a clone of "Hot or Not" really helps people connect. If Harvard didn't take Facemash down and Mark didn't face any sort of threat of punishment (expulsion, violation of copyright, etc) would Facebook actually exist currently? I don't think the "scratch your own itch" mantra works in this situation

Pay attention to details:

>He was meticulous about capitalizing the “F” in Facebook

Facebook is the name of the site and company and as such it is a proper noun. I don't know why it would even be a noteworthy thing to want to ensure that a proper noun is capitalized.

Give ownership to the team:

>Engineers and product managers could come up with features and build them out without needing anyone’s approval.

But previously Noah stated that:

>Every idea we’d bring, he’d ask, “Does this help growth or not?”

With that kind of reaction to a feature being suggested it doesn't seem to me like there was as much free reign to build features as this section implies.