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Our role is to be a platform for making all of these apps more social, and it's kind of an extension of what we see happening on the web, with the exception of mobile, which I think will be even more important than the web in a few years - maybe even sooner.
If we're trying to build a world-class News Feed and a world-class messaging product and a world-class search product and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality and build drones, I can't write every line of code. I can't write any lines of code.
If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.
If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same. If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different; if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change.
Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn't smooth. You'll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don't believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don't give up.
We talk about this concept of openness and transparency as the high-level ideal that we're moving towards at Facebook. The way that we get there is by empowering people to share and connect. The combination of those two things leads the world to become more open.
While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.
It's not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.
Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories... We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that's out there.
I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog. And I mean, we don't have a lot of furniture in our house, so it's really simple. And we're trying to build products for everyone in the world, right. And you don't want to get isolated to do that.
What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that's a problem that's probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that's actually within the range of affordability.
We have a pretty ambitious goal for the world. What we think will make the Web better. What we think will make all these businesses that integrate with us run more effectively. I think if we stay focused on doing that, that's really the main thing that we need to do.
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.
There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don't usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.
Today we can only hear the voices and witness the imaginations of one-third of the world's people. We are all being robbed of the creativity and potential of the two-thirds of the world not yet online. Tomorrow, if we succeed, the Internet will truly represent everyone.
Just because you can build a machine that is better than a person at something doesn't mean that it is going to have the ability to learn new domains or connect different types of information or context to do superhuman things. This is critically important to appreciate.
Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January.
Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn't do with anything else, we just have to do it.
I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that's true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.
I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
There's a level of service that we could provide when we're just at Harvard that we can't provide for all of the colleges, and there's a level of service that we can provide when we're a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things.
People will always want more immersive ways to express themselves. So if you go back ten years ago on the internet, most of what people shared and consumed was text. Now a lot of it is photos. I think, going forward, a lot of it is going to be videos, getting richer and richer.
If you want to be free, or you want to preserve freedom for people, you both need to have laws that make it so people have freedom of speech and all the freedoms that they need. You also need to have an open governance system where people can vote and people have representation.
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.
There are really two core principles at play here. There's giving people a voice so that people can express their opinions. Then, there's keeping the community safe, which I think is really important. We're not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things.
Frankly, I think that the news industry is critically important because it points out things and surfaces truths that can often be uncomfortable. I think that that's working, and the spotlight has been pointed on things that we have a responsibility to do better, and I accept that.
While we generally believe in free speech and giving everyone as much ability to speak as possible, in practice there are lots of barriers to that, whether it's legal restrictions, technological restrictions or you can't share what you want if you don't have access to the internet.
I feel like the thing we can do is celebrate people doing great work and create more cultural momentum and awareness that this is an important thing in the world. So when the next economic crisis hits and people are talking about where to cut from the budget, science isn't the thing.
It used to be the case, like you'd switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn't keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.
It used to be the case, like, you'd switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn't keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job. Just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.
The question I ask myself like almost every day is: ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?' Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time. And that’s what this company is.
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.
One of the things that we're trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren't all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.
I actually do think you're seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that's a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what's going on with them.
You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you're not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.
I think what we've found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about, they tend to be more engaging. I think that we're really going to see this huge shift where a lot of industry is and products are just going to be remade to be social.
There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn't how we've approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.
In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don't pretend that if Facebook didn't exist, that this wouldn't even be possible. Of course, it would have.
We're very focused on making News Feed really good, making our photos experience really good, making messaging really good, and creating great location apps. That's the nature of a platform business of our scale. Most companies that are relevant to us will have some overlaps in some competitive way.
There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.
You could probably go all the way back to the first books. I bet people said 'why should you read when you could talk to other people?' The point of reading is that you get to deeply immerse yourself in a person's perspective. Right? Same thing with newspapers or phones or TVs. Soon it will be VR, I bet.
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn't know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it's not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.
Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know - not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that's kind of different from the information you put in your profile.
There have been misperceptions that we're trying to make all the information open on Facebook, and that's completely false. There are big buckets of information that we recommend that you share with only your friends privately. Then some of the more basic information, we recommend that that's visible to everyone.
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. So inherently, our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one.
We started off as this platform inside Facebook; and we were pretty clear from the beginning that that wasn't where it was going to end up. A lot of people saw it and asked, 'Why is Facebook trying to get all these applications inside Facebook when the web is clearly the platform?' And we actually agreed with that.
Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They're keeping up with their friends and family, but they're also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you're not on it now.
I mean, we've built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it's really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that's what's so amazing about the scale that it's at today.