CHM Revolutionaries: Facebook Effect- Author David Kirkpatrick & FB's CEO Mark Zuckerberg

good evening everyone and welcome to the museum my name is John Haller I'm the CEO and on behalf of the trustees our staff our members and everyone involved with the museum it's a pleasure to welcome you here tonight to this event it is the latest installment in our series of programs on the 40th anniversary of the events that led to today's fully wired world I want to begin by thanking Intel for serving as the lead sponsor of our net at 40 series Intel is a very generous supporter and a good friend of the museum and we very much appreciate their underwriting of these programs along the way we've also had support from Symantec Corporation and of course our donors and members who in the last 12 months have provided more than two million dollars in support for our work Kepler's is the museum partner for books related to our programs as they are tonight they'll be selling the Facebook effect after our program I want to thank Clark Kepler for their ongoing partnership Clark is here tonight Clark thank you and finally thank you to HP and it's mag cloud service which is the partner for the publication of the booklets that are on your chairs and around the museum tonight all of our matte cloud publications are now available for purchase online in case you didn't get one tonight you want to order one for a friend a member of the museum emailed me a few days ago with this note he said I hope when you're introducing the Facebook event you'll remind everyone that we're here tonight because two guys named Klein and Duvall were hunched over computers late one night in 1969 trying to send the letters L ogi in from SR I to UCLA over the ARPANET so there I've done my duty alphabet soup and all the connection between the launch of the ARPANET and relative solitude 40 years ago and the explosion of Facebook is not linear as we have covered in previous events and in the history that's printed tonight but without question our global society is surely traveling at breakneck speed down a continuum that began with L o GI n and today connects billions around the world this journey is at its core of what this museum is all about if you reduced all of recorded human history 24-hour day the birth of the internet would amount to a fraction of a second the birth of Facebook and the socially connected electronic world far less than that and yet consider the immensity of the reality that we are all living in as little as two generations to generations we are moving from a time of no electronic connections at all to a time when we can hardly imagine not being connected we therefore confront an interesting paradox the blockbuster innovations of the Information Age are coming thick and fast and their impact is enormous as impactful as anything may have ever been and yet we risk losing their history as quickly as we see their history created this is the essence of the work of the museum we're seeking to capture the stories the first-hand accounts the lessons learned and the physical and digital products of both genius and failure in our time or as Donna Dubinsky put it in her famous analogy from the film you saw a moment ago to talk to Michelangelo as he paints the Sistine Chapel one big difference of course is that from time to time an historian of Michelangelo's era might have found him flat on his back atop a scaffolding we don't find many people sitting still so what we are attempting is contemporary history at speed it's humbling and it's challenging but with the help of many hundreds of people we're determined to make it work and to make it worthwhile for generations to come that's why we have assembled the world's largest collection of more than a hundred thousand items related to computing going all the way back to keep who sticks in the ancient abacus and all the way forward to the iPad it's why we have recorded nearly 500 oral histories of the men and women who have made history here in Silicon Valley and around the world it's why we have our Fellows Program the 52 portraits of which are collected on the wall just outside this auditorium they comprise some of the greatest figures in the history of Technology it's why we undertake 20 to 30 programs like this every year all of which are few eat fully viewable on our branded YouTube channel it's why we're the only major Museum in the world within internet history program and a forthcoming area of our revolution exhibit dedicated to the web and networking and finally it's why we have a vast digital museum at Computer History org where among other things we release the original source code for mech paint and quick-draw for the world to see for the first time yesterday morning something our friends at Apple have at least at this point permitted only us to do those of us in this branch of contemporary history do better when we stick together that's one reason why we're so delighted to be associated with David Kirkpatrick author of the fascinating book that we're exploring tonight and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who just a few hours ago announced that the Facebook community has now exceeded this milestone 500 million users we may not know how history will ultimately write the Facebook story but two things are certain David Kirkpatrick has made an excellent start and his help and support was clearly instrumental Mark's help and support was clearly instrumental to David's exceptional storytelling all of David's experience is on full display in the Facebook effect 20 years as a senior writer at Fortune magazine author of the fortune column fast forward founder host and program director of the brainstorm conference series founder of the tech anomie conference kicking off next month at Lake Tahoe conducting this conversation between David and Mark tonight is NPR's guy Roz Weekend host of all things considered one of the most sought-after interviewers in the business he has interviewed everyone from Ariel Sharon to Eminem this marks a return trip to the museum for guy who kicked off the net at 40 Series in the spring by interviewing ARPANET pioneer Bob Taylor if tonight is as freewheeling and candid as his evening with Bob Taylor was we are in for a real treat you can contribute to that with the question cards that are on your chair you can write your questions down we'll be collecting them for guy once we get a little further into the program please join me now in welcoming Mark David and guide to the stage for tonight's program okay well thank you very much John and I I'm gonna dispense with any opening remarks and dive right into the questions as I think many of us here have many questions for both Mark and David the first question is for you David and I just wanted you to give us a sense of what you mean when you talk about the Facebook effect what is that well it's it's a generic kind of concept about all of the ways in which this massive social phenomenon social and technological phenomenon is changing the world and I you know I talk about politics government business marketing identity privacy social life and other areas really when you get to 500 million people on any system there are enormous ramifications and Facebook was designed from the beginning in order to have certain ramifications that successfully having Mark Zuckerberg obviously congratulations are in order because of the announcement today on your Facebook page right say it was your Facebook page so that's how it was this is a blog post and we first saw the video 500 million users that's double the number of users you had about a year ago give me a sense of a Facebook a moment over the past year that has wowed you something that happened that you thought the thing that I created made that happen well you know I mean so we just the thing that we did to commemorate now having 500 million people is we I just assembled this collection of story is that the people who use our service have written into us over the years and if I can go give a few back they're really kind of amazing and and very varied right I mean everything from the guy who's the last prime minister of Denmark found basically had a bunch of connections on his Facebook page and they became his jogging buddies right who well I was gonna put that in my book and I think I forgot yeah that's a good right yeah - I mean there's a mayor in a city and in Connecticut who found that one of his constituents needed a I think was a kidney and then when it donated his own kidney so I mean it like the stories that we hear from people range from these kind of incredibly profound things like that to just really kind of day-to-day things where people are just trying to stay connected with their friends and family and the people that they care about and now have a way to do that that's a lot easier than anything that they had before do you ever get freaked out about how how powerful this tool that you invented has become that those things can happen the everything it's I mean it's people doing them right I think like the what we've really built as a platform right I mean we're not building a system where people are donating organs or I mean we're donating a system where where people can stay connected with the people that they want to and um you know and there's always been the ability for people to sit down face to face and have a conversation right I mean for a while there's been the ability for people to call someone up no matter where they are and it's been gotten a lot cheaper recently but to be able to have kind of a synchronous one-way conversation with people who you're willing to call off right and who you have that level of comfort with but until recently there hasn't really been a good system for you to keep in touch with all of the other people who are in your life where you meet at some point who who are important or were important and you want to keep up with but you don't have a way to talk to on a day-to-day basis and you wouldn't go out of your way to call and you would never sit down with in person and and it's the power that's unlocked from that is really what we're seeing here right and when you can build up all of the the value of those latent connections and keep them open that this is the type of stuff that becomes possible but it's because people want to do it on their own anyway we're just kind of allowing people to have that the ability to do those things and all that is what I would call the Facebook effect I mean it was it was designed to be a viral platform for communication and you know I think it is a good point that mark just made that Facebook is literally just a platform it has no content of its own whatsoever everything there is created by its members and and I think this this viral system that mark effectively designed quite consciously where information flows especially because of the newsfeed from person to person with amazing efficiency if it's of interest that is sort of the root of the effect that it's that kind of the name of my book David in in John's introduction he mentioned Bob Taylor who was on this stage actually in your seat about two or three months ago he is not an international celebrity most people in the world have not heard above Taylor farm or nova mark zuckerberg yes um he is arguably the father of computer to computer communication okay and you mentioned him in your book which by the way is a is a great not just a primer on Facebook but a fun book to read so thank you I want to let you know where where does Mark Zuckerberg in your view fit into the history of the internet or the history of communications well I think that anybody who's created a system that gets to 500 million people particularly in six years deserves a fairly great prominence in the history of innovators and communication uh you know the world is changing so fast now that it's it's harder to put someone in the hierarchy the way we might have once felt comfortable doing so you know is Mark more important than Alexander Graham Bell or equally important I have I don't have a clue I mean he doesn't think so I mean but you know it we'll find out over time but you know I mean Facebook will not last as long as the telephone did I can assure you of that so we'll have to make our judgments more rapidly about these matters there you go you heard it here first I'm not saying it's not a great thing mark but it's not gonna let hope the fake telephones been around for like a hundred years you think Facebook will be here in a hundred years literally you really do I don't know but I don't know how long telephones are gonna be around for it no no I know that's a tie but I mean I mean I'm talking about from its inception to today do you think Facebook has the aspect of a hundred year I mean little but this is a question I get all the time you know how what's Facebook gonna be in ten years and I always say I cannot even begin to answer any question like that about any internet business do you think it's a reasonable assumption that Facebook will be a strong and powerful business in ten years or even I mean what do you think was that ten years I hope so ten years okay what about 40 years I mean it's like I think that these things change over time so I mean I think that you know if you look at some of the great technology companies they made a huge change in the world and then transitioned into great long-term businesses all right so I mean companies like IBM are maybe not kind of at the forefront right now of consumer technology but our still great company is long after being the massive innovators and they're spaced I think these companies can be around for a very long period of time but I certainly think that the trend that we're operating on now of helping people share information which is really something that you know going back 20 years ago most people in society did not have the power to do I mean the Internet has really brought that about now everyone can share their opinions and information about themselves or what's going on around them and that's a new thing and I think that's the trend that we're hoping to help push forward and I think that that's gonna be one of the most transformative trends in society over the next 10 15 I mean who knows how long but the fact that a system could have grown just 500 million in a little over six years just suggests that the pace of change is truly accelerating every time so something else is many others something else's are going to come along and virgin with incredible speed so this is what I would say it tell me if I'm right about that you you I say that you take as a mantra only the paranoid survive and one of the reasons why you make all these changes that affect privacy and product is because you are literally afraid of the four squares of the Twitter's and the other innovators and you do not want to be rendered irrelevant and you want Facebook to remain a vital cutting edge service than you know that requires constant you like to think we're a little more proactive than that what do you mean I don't think that the changes are motivated etive at a fear as much as wanting to help me with the world forward okay let me let me ask you about this idea of moving the world forward because with with this incredible product you offer I'm sure there isn't a person in this room who doesn't use it I obviously use it you also have a very powerful database I believe the largest database of personal information that exists outside the realm of government right Facebook if it were a country would be the third most populous in the world I mean you are the head of a cut of a country one out of fourteen don't tell that's going on up here that I don't agree with what one out of 14 humans on planet earth is now a has a facebook profile it doesn't make us a country it does 500 million does it's an extraordinary number of people do you remind yourself daily of the responsibility that that puts in your hands you're 26 years old you are a young guy I know that is you're reminded of that all the time and I'm sorry to do it again but you are and it's an immense amount of responsibility what do you how do you handle that responsibility and I think the main thing is we've just assembled a team at the company that has this tremendous sense of purpose for what we're doing right so I mean it goes back to some of the questions that you were asking about building companies where a lot of the people at Facebook including myself never thought we would be a part of a company I mean we I started Facebook and a lot of the people you joined early on I think still joined the company are doing it just because they believe in what we're doing and they believe that if you can give people tools to share information and to stay connected with the people that they care about that that just opens up all these possibilities and then if you can build a development platform which on top of which all these other people can build social applications then you can create a whole lot of new experiences that weren't possible before so but I think it's that kind of clarity around what we're trying to do that I think is what gives us the ability to keep on doing like these rounds of innovation instead of you know and then the type of stuff that you're talking about right like mm-hmm becoming a company people have a very hard time believing that about Facebook that's a fact I mean they really I'm to be honest I don't think you do as good a job communicating is you could the scope of the vision and that the passion that you and your colleagues as you describe Sharon it's one aspect of my book that people challenge me on everywhere I go they cannot believe that Facebook isn't doing it for the money for the ad marketplace etc etc thank you can I just follow up with a specific question sure about this you know because one of the things that I know about you is you love product you love engineering you know what you would rather be doing is sitting at a terminal talking to the product team and the engineers to make the product better right doing that way I know you will so probably every night but Facebook is as guy is implying it's sort of a turning point where it's scale is requiring a new sort of responsibility on its part and one of the questions that I have for you is you know do you really want to be the leader of a company that requires this constant interface with government and regulators around the world in order to you know keep explaining what it is you're doing because they are pushing back as you well know and quite understandably because it's something you describe as the utility so I mean the way that I think about this is you know a lot of people have asked me this question okay now that Facebook has 500 million people or is nearly 500 million people before today you know a lot of the job has become you know in addition to building things building out a team communicating externally now and and kind of dealing with with a lot of these different constituents that we wouldn't have had to deal with when we had 10 million people using our product so I know those are things that are typically you see with a mature company right and I think the way that we think about this is that if we thought that Facebook was a mature company and was anywhere near the end of its trajectory in terms of being able to innovate or or that the product was near maturity in terms of its development if people were sharing on the order of the amount of information that we think that they'll end up sharing then you know maybe those things would overwhelm how fun it was to build this but we just don't think we're anywhere near the beginning I mean instead what we I mean anywhere near the end now what we've seen is you know there's this massive trend on the internet towards there being all kinds of information available I mean when I was growing up I Google came out when I was in Middle School right and and so I mean there are these search engines it's like so growing up and like every year there there's like some new cool thing all right so um it's a corner to guard there's a search engine now you can look for anything you want or in another year it's a call right now there's Wikipedia you can like get reference material on anything you want now there's Napster you can get any song you want right there's like all these different services but the thing that I think is most interesting to people is other people right so I think it makes sense in a way that Facebook is by far the most engaging app that's been built online to date I mean people who use Facebook spend much more time with Facebook per person than any other app so what we did for the first few years of building the company from 2004 to 2007 was with really a small group of people we just started building versions of products that were designed from the ground up to be built around people right so we built things like photos and groups and events and what we found was you know each of these projects was built with a group of maybe two or three people right because at the time the company was 20 or 50 people or 20 to 50 people in that and someone would build this photos application that didn't have a lot of the features of other photos applications right there were no high-resolution photos you can print I mean early on you couldn't even reorder the photos in an album but what it had was it was built from the ground up so that as soon as you shared a photo all your friends had it and it turned out that that feature was more important than every other feature tagging of people was and the same thing for groups and the same thing for events so what we have now is Facebook photos are used I think three four five times more than all other photo services on the internet combined right and a similar story for groups and a similar story for events so then we hit this turning point in 2007 where we said okay we think that we can take basically any application and by building it to be around people which are the thing that people care the most about if we just if we if we if we did that then we think we could build a more engaging version of any application out there but because there's so many applications that need to get built rather than trying to build these all ourselves with teams of two or three people where we're not building all the features that whole companies could let's build a development platform right and that's what we've been focused on since then and what we've seen since then is I mean just in the most recent release right we built this thing called social plugins where where you can just any site can take a line of HTML copy and paste it and drop it into to their sites so for example cnn.com right has this and you can look at any news article and you can see which of your friends liked that article without CNN ever knowing who you are who your friends are but it's a really a cool experience and what sites that have used these social plugins have seen is that the engagement that they've gotten from people using Facebook has gone up by about 2x the referrals from Facebook and that's just a simple integration so you can imagine that people are doing a lot deeper things are getting even even stronger results right in the first one that I think we're really seeing of an industry getting completely transformed as games I think games are often an early indicator in a new platform we kind of saw that with the iPhone there were games but okay good well fair and I think early PC there were a lot of games Facebook games are really one of the first things that took off and they're all these companies there's Zynga there's play fish there's played um crowd star a whole kind of new set of companies and I mean we're these are real companies I mean Playfish was acquired for almost four hundred million dollars last year I'm Zynga on the the secondary private markets has a market cap that's about half of that of EA with an eighth of the number of employees and that's disruptions right and so I think what we're gonna see is so this is your one right in terms of this industry is is kind of the first one that's getting transformed but I just think over the next few years we're gonna see it in every industry mm-hm and so that's exciting right so now back to your question about is it ok to spend some time interfacing with the media and governments and all that yeah if you get to do that so but interject you for a moment guys I want to get back mark to this idea of the the question that I asked you this idea of this immense database and and I and I don't mean to present it as some kind of nefarious thing that you're sitting atop but we know that Facebook has this incredible ability to say to an advertiser you want to target 26 year old women who like Bikram yoga and we can get you there which is amazing now I trust you and you trust is your currency and you're telling us to trust you and and we do let's say but what happens in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years when you're not let's say in charge of the company or your power is is altered in the company and somebody in the company decides to take that data about us the information that we have volunteered and hand it over about our likes and dislikes a music we listen to our birth dates who were married to what our kids names are and sells that information what kind of guarantee is there that that won't happen well I just think it would be the stupidest thing we could possibly do but so what so you're not gonna be CEO or that for um no I mean the internet I mean we're talking about how technology moves so quickly right and I think it's really easy to say that there's all this information that Facebook has or something like that but really what what Facebook is today is this engine in this community of people sharing a lot of information where on a day-to-day basis except the information is centralized well actually I think that's that's maybe a misconception because the rate of information that people are sharing is increasing so quickly that growth right is that the amount of content that people had in the system last year will be just a fraction of the content that's in the system at the end of this year and it's gonna keep on growing and not only are more people signing up to use the service because they want to stay connected with friends and family but every day that goes by each person on the service on average is sharing more information into the system so here's an analogy that I think is actually pretty apt for this um I think about Wikipedia right Wikipedia has this policy where any person can go download all of Wikipedia and fork it and create a rival encyclopedia and you know some people have taken some Wikipedia content and tried to do that but no one ever creates anything that's any work comes near close to to quality of Wikipedia the reason for that is because the real thing that wikipedia is isn't an encyclopedia it's a community of people that build encyclopedias so you can copy the Encyclopedia somewhere else but you're not copying the community now Facebook is very similar because we have all these open api's right and we're building a platform like I was just talking about and people can go and they can take all their information anywhere else what Facebook is isn't a set of information today it's a community of people who are using Facebook to stay connected and share information they're only gonna do that as long as they trust us and as long as we're the best tool that exists to do that so just to confirm when if they were to decide to leave it that data would be wiped out you people can use the API that can take their information to all these other services not only are we okay with that we're encouraging it that's the whole platform strategy that were embarked is by allowing people to do that we're allowing much more innovation in other apps that we would never get around to building in the we know that that for many people is not a choice any longer because so many people have come to depend on Facebook it is not just a cultural phenomenon it is an indispensable part of many people's lives you describe Facebook as a utility like The Electric Company like the phone company two questions should it be regular why shouldn't it be regulated like utility and if it is a utility couldn't you make the argument that it's a monopoly he doesn't mean that when he says utility so well we should not use the word utility because everybody thinks utilities are regularly what we got started everyone compared us to MySpace right and the big difference that we saw between ourselves in myspace was that people used MySpace because it was cool and because it was fun and people asked us this question all the time what's gonna happen when Facebook is no longer cool right I mean it's been around for six years where things don't stay cool forever my answer that question is that our goal was never to build something cool right it was to build something useful and you know something that's cool is not going to be around for a long time something that's useful is around for a very long time potentially if it continues to be useful so to me when I say utility that's right man is that we're trying to provide people with utility not have something that's kind of that's fun in terms of regulation I mean we get regulated by users right I mean is that enough it seemed I think like there's plenty of dialogue around what we do and important issues that are going on on the Internet I think we've shown that we listen carefully to that and that influences our policies and the products that we make and you know like I was just saying we support this open platform and we want to design it so that people can go and they can take their information and go to any other service that they want um marking in David's book you're quoted as saying having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack integrity which i think is an interesting quote and it goes on to explain that people shouldn't have a different persona present a different persona for their co-workers and a different persona to their friends so say you know I behave in a certain way around my family and behave a slightly different way around my co-workers you you would argue that there's a lack of integrity there I'm wondering why you think that is I mean do you think that we should all interact in the exact same way with everybody we know no I think that was just a sentence that that I said the like that wasn't like some music boat that argument I was worried you were gonna say that no I mean if you think about what what is the definition of integrity I think it it literally is being the same thing and different things you the same for words right now that you are when you're with your friends for nine years I actually probably yeah I mean same you know awkward person we I think that that is the definition of integrity right is is like the dictionary definition is having the same face for not saying one thing to someone and saying a different thing to someone else so I think actually by definition if you are presenting one face to another to one set of people in another to another that is a lack of integrity I wasn't making a value that's when you study Greek going Jana's head right but you do talk a lot about on this idea of explores how do you transparency with both of you because I think it's it's fascinating and I'm interested in this idea of transparency because there's different ways of looking at David Brooks the New York Times writes about the salon talks about transparency in government and how paradoxically it has created a climate where more more of fewer Americans actually trust government the more transparent government is fewer people trust it you you really push this idea of openness and transparency what do you think what do you think it'll lead to why do you think people should want to learn one what do you think it will lead why do you think people should be willing to to reveal details about their lives open open themselves up to the world I mean why not keep some things private you know well I think people will always keep some things private right I think the big difference between now and 20 or 30 years ago is now everyone at least has the tools if they want to to share things but a core tenet of Facebook has always been control right from the very first version of the site we built privacy controls that every single piece of information that you put on the site you could say exactly who saw it and one of the challenges that we've had is the company has grown is trying to make it stuff that scales because now people are sharing way more things than they were at the beginning and we want to make sure that they continue to have controls for each thing but we don't want to have a thousand different controls that they touch so so that that's one of the big areas that that we've been that we've been modifying and innovating on recently is just now you know there's just one master control you know you go to your emergency page you can say in two clicks I want all the content I share in a day to day basis to be visible to only my friends in fearly what was a response to the criticism and and and that has dissipated by and large so but going back to the question no sorry question go for it please control when people feel comfortable sharing information and they feel like they have control over what they share and who they share it with people become comfortable sharing more things right so for example if I only could choose to share my mobile phone number with everyone on Facebook I wouldn't do it but because I can do it with only my friends I do it right so now there's more ability for me to actually share those things what I think that that creates over time is there are these opportunities for people to share more things and a lot of people are realizing that hey it's really valuable for me to share more things in certain contexts and that leads to this kind of broader social change where I think now there's more transparency where I mean more people are blogging more people are using Facebook to share more stuff more people are using Twitter more people are posting stuff on YouTube that means that if we want there's more out there that we can go look at and research and understand what's going on with the people around us and I just think that that leads to broader kind of empathy understanding just a lot of kind of good core human things that make society function better david has written a very interesting chapter on privacy the book which I found very useful and and did you want to well I was going to say first of all I totally buy what Mark said I mean the reason people put so much data on Facebook is because from day one it was the first place that ever existed on the internet that had privacy controls it was the only place anybody had ever put their real name and their cell phone number and their email address because they could control who saw their data and I think one of the reasons this privacy issue is so fraught for Facebook and leads to so much discussion and controversy is because people have entrusted an enormous amount of data to it and I I think they're worried that maybe their trust was misplaced and this is where I think guys question before is a legitimate one about what would happen if you weren't in charge you know and and there is this huge mass of data in there but but rather than have you asked answer that again I I would like to ask you another question which is closely related and very related to what you just said my own personal feeling and I spent a lot of time talking to people about Facebook it's like all I've been doing for the last six or eight weeks is because I've been promoting my book and I just came from Kansas City last night so why doesn't Facebook make it much much even easier than it is to set up group functionality so you can control like the family the best friends the high school friends the church friends the friends you just friended on Facebook because you couldn't say no each one of those each one of them but each one of those is a different category for whom you want different visibility into you and you want to see different visibility into them and it seems to me you would get more sharing if that functionality was radically improved it's you've got it it doesn't know you're right it's not easy enough to use your I don't even know it's there you're right so how do you do a deal with that you're gonna help we need to do better you're gonna do better yeah I mean this is one of the core areas that that we need to work on now and that we are working on is now people of all these different groups of friends it used to be that saying I want to share with my friends was a good that that meant private right like I don't want to share with everyone I want to share with my friends but now I think more and more people have subgroups of friends that they want to be able to share different things with subgroups that I think is a really important case and we're cutting at it in a lot of different ways to get there and hopefully soon a lot more to talk about I mean what it said by what extent does to what extent does the success of Facebook depend on users choosing the less the least restrictive settings privacy exhibits I don't really think that that matters much I think the the key is that people can share with whoever they want reading that people and it goes back to the point I was making before with Wikipedia what we have is a community of people here who are this engine for sharing and connecting the key is that they can do that is like in whatever way that they want right so I think that the question that you're talking about of being able to segment it into and just saying okay here's my family here's my work friend that's here are my school friends you're my high school friends whatever it is that will be really valuable to do but but I think that that kind of gets to one of the the core things and in building Facebook is that designing products that do these things simply is pretty hard right and I think that that's one of the big innovations that we've had is I mean we are on you guys like we were watching that video I mean we're not designing micro processors but what we are doing is designing very simple ways for people to have social interactions that are very nuanced and and I'm you know I think it's a lot easier in a lot of these cases to point to what a problem is than to come up with what is the solution that people will actually use so let me give you an example of something that we did that actually didn't work that well or our first cut at trying to help people segment stuff a segment there their friend list into groups was this functionality that we call friend lists right it basically you can go and you can create a list of people and you can put whatever friends you want to whatever lists you can say okay here my high school friends here my college friends here my work friends whatever it turns out that most people don't want to go and create lists of things right I mean most people would not ever even have a friend have a friendless to begin with except for the fact that the act of creating friends is a very nice social interaction I mean you get to reach out to someone and say hey you know I like you will you be my friend and then the person you can say like yeah right and I mean that's that's nice right I mean there's like this nice feeling that that goes along with that um and I think that's why people do it right new people aren't on Facebook because they want to list their friends right so it that's what we're designing the product is about right it's kind of coming up with these ways that align people what people are trying to do which is stay connected with building out this platform which is going to help them stay connected even more when you can do more things with it so I think everyone agrees no doubt we would be in a better place and people would be able to share more if everyone magically had these subgroups created I think that there is a solution to it and we need to get there but it's hard then um and that's one of the big things that we working this is a passionate subject for Sean Parker as you know I mean he believes that you should every time you see a name on Facebook you should have an easy drop-down menu you should be able to put people into a group based on you know your group's just based every time you see the name shove them into a different group change their group or whatever but but you know and you said something before that I think is really interesting and I'd like to just quickly I know it's sort of a dual interview here but anyway you said it doesn't matter whether people use the everyone privacy setting that much right you made this change in December where you sort of forcibly caused people to use the everyone privacy setting and it led to a lot of controversy and you undid that later are you saying that when you undid it you didn't regret it and feel like oh we sort of lost the ability to do things I wanted to do I mean I personally was not happy that I had always had my friends list friends only and you undid that now you've given me the ability to go back to the way I like it but you know how important was it to you to try to make it the way that you tried to make it so honestly a lot of what we were trying to do was just create a very simple experience right we don't we don't want to have a million different settings that people have to touch because if they do then they won't or and then they won't use the system because then they don't feel like they can control their stuff so what we tried to create a simple a simple set a simple system for this based on the settings that we actually saw that people were using and we made some mistakes and we got it wrong and it turns out that even if only 0.1% of users use a setting they really care about that setting know well and so it's fine right I mean but that's that's our job is to try to balance that we make a lot of these trade-offs I hope more often than not we get them right sometimes we make mistakes we always listen we try to to make sure that when people have feedback that we take that into account and when it's real user feedback right not not just some things there that are getting kind of a lot of attention but you know I think the reason why we made a lot of the changes is because we we look at how people use the site right and the set has evolved a lot over time it started off as this college thing right I mean I built the first version when I was in my dorm room at Harvard and the way that the site worked early on was you shared with the people around you in your college community and your friends so it was it always had this element of it was your friends but it was also the people around you right because I mean you wanted to share with maybe the the people who were in your classes it's at school or the people who you were in a club with who weren't your friends yet right and that was really valuable now as we got out of college and and more people started signing up we found that there weren't as good proxies in society as a college for like the social circle that's surrounded your whole community so we tried other things like the the city around you right and that worked pretty well but then we were growing so quickly that what happened was we couldn't actually keep up and we couldn't actually provision a city for each geographic area so what we ended up with especially early on when we didn't have a lot of international growth was we had these kind of crazy situations where a whole country would be a network right so Germany was a network India was one network China was the network so everyone on those countries could effectively see everybody's info yeah exactly now the interesting thing is that those users were more engaged on the site than people who could only see and communicate with the people around them in college so in the u.s. we almost had this completely different experience right where a lot of us have these college networks we have work network so we have networks work for our companies and that's been our experience it's been a lot tighter and we enjoy that even though ironically it's led us to use the site less on average whereas internationally we're now 70% of our users are outside of the US they are actually getting a huge amount of value out of sharing in that way and having those be the settings so we decided okay well going forward for new users let's do something that's more like that so that's what we did when we got feedback on that people wanted to make sure that they could tweak it more easily if if they weren't happy with those settings then we kind of holed up in a room for a few weeks and we built that where we built this one control where now you go to your privacy page and there's just one control and you know you can click twice and have all your content set to friends and you're good but we really listened it what people use how people use the site right because people are at the site so we listen to what people say when they write in to us but we also listen to what they're actually doing and we look at the data of how people are using the site and we try to make informed decisions based on that move away from the privacy issue for a moment or still have lots of questions for you and I'm sure there's lots of questions out there as well but if we're asking about Apple and I want to ask you about how much of an impact Apple has on how you are thinking about calibrating your products as as you're aware many people are using Facebook on mobile devices increasingly myself you cannot right now for example upload a video you take with your iPhone directly to Facebook as more and more people start to use Facebook on on mobile devices particularly Apple devices will you start to alter your products to accommodate those users well I think in a way we were to do and we have an iPhone app which is specific to the iPhone which more than 50% of people who have iPhones have but the thing I'm talking about for example uploading video I mean obviously Apple has this issue I think is an understatement with Adobe so how do you sort of what do you do about that we do the best we can you stay diplomatic I mean there's it's a great platform right and a lot of people like using it it actually it is an interesting challenge developing things today because in 2004 when when I got started with Facebook it was very clear what we were gonna build we were gonna build a website why we weren't building desktop software we weren't building something for a phone right the desktop software was the past phones were too far off in the future and not a mature enough platform yet build something for the web do you know today I think it's it's it there are all these opportunities and challenges because you have a web version you have an iPhone version you have an Android version you have an iPad version you have a mobile web version for phones that have touch interfaces you have a mobile web version for cheaper feature phones which don't have which don't have like rich and browsing interfaces and it actually ends up being really challenging to develop for all these environments but but it reaches a lot of people you know so I mean it's it's it's how people want to use the service so we we spend a lot of time doing it in a recent article in The New York Times Miguel Health wrote an article that said Google regards Facebook as its biggest threat today do you think that you threaten Google you know it's interesting that people talk about that so much because if you think about it on its face we don't do any of the same products right I mean it's like they do search we don't do search and they've email we don't do we know we have maps yeah but they do more direct response advertising and we do more brand advertising so even that is quite different so I don't know I mean I think for what there's one perspective on Google which is that Google's market cap is greater than that of all other Internet companies put together so from that perspective they could see any growing company as a threat but from our perspective they don't have to lose for us to win right I mean more people are using Facebook every day and that doesn't mean people are using Google right so what we're trying to do is just make it so that people can stay connected with their friends and the people around them better that's just not a not a service than anyone else currently provides we think it's important so we're going to try to do it as best as we can I would just wanted to make a point on the Apple issue you know the Facebook app is so central to the success of the iPhone that if Facebook were to determine that the way that Apple was handling video was truly problematic for facebook in my opinion they would have more leverage than anybody probably on the planet to argue for a change in the way it's handled I mean I firmly believe the iPhone would not have become nearly the phenomenon that it is and I have one if the IFIF Facebook app wasn't on it it it's a huge percentage of total application use on the iPhone I'm sure it's if any of us heard the number which is a highly closely held secret it would be astonishing how high a percentage of usage it is so mark is not in thrall to Steve Jobs that's what I'm saying I think Facebook has extensive leverage if that needs to exercise it I mean I doubt if mark would confirm that his opinion on that but that's my opinion and I do know isn't it true you're spending a lot of you've gotten to know jobs pretty well recently haven't you haven't you spent some time talking to him lately yeah he's great yeah I think he spends a fair amount of time talking him no I mean I would say a fair amount I spent all my time building products but there's that ambassador responsibility coming up again you know of competitors or potential competitors what do you make of these groups of people who are working on open source social networks like Facebook where data would not be central would not be stored in a central location diaspora for example you've got to be aware of this I donated money to them reading David's book it reminded me and reading about how you guys created Facebook it seems like there's a lot of that kind of in diaspora eh does it worry you be it does it remind you of yourself three or four five you know I mean I think it's cool early on at Facebook we had this project wire hog that I think you actually cover a bit in your book right bit yes and um I don't actually even read the book and he doesn't like he's not gonna read straight are you gonna watch the movie though it's probably not but you get there what aren't there I mean so early on you know so we talked about a little before about how photos ended up being such an important part of the Facebook ecosystem and from early on our our users were requesting that we add more photos to the site and really or that we had no money right in and and hosting photos is expensive so we figured okay let's build a decentralized application that can plug into Facebook that's a web server that looks a lot like what these guys are doing where people can host their own photos and wouldn't that be great right and I think it just turned out that at least in our implementation we can get it to work as well as we wanted and it turned out that us hosting the photos application running that ourselves was a much better solution once we have the resources to be able to do that but I just think it's cool that all these people are trying all these different things right I mean I think some things some some technical systems become decentralized some become centralized right I think we can all probably agree that it would be pretty bad if the search index were split on to ten different sites and you had to search in a lot of different places I mean that's the service that I think makes a lot of sense to to have centralized but we okay alright and so I don't know I just think it's cool to see what all these people are doing right I mean people are building great apps that use the social graph through Facebook like games and and all these other applications people are building building other kind of alternative structures to mapping out the graph that I think are cool innovations it's all cool and Mark I in a spirit of openness and transparency that obviously you I do have to ask you some questions that you probably don't want to talk about but there is a Facebook fan page 5,000 users have signed up the fan fan page for a film called the social network it has a Facebook page you know that I say more than that for my book we all know that this is a telling will just say a a kind of telling or an imagined telling of well imagined history of Facebook first thing do you plan do you plan to see the film I mean probably not I generally I don't read stuff I watch it do you I mean do you have do you have any anxiety about it coming out do you have any worries or concerns is it annoying you know honestly I wish that when people tried to do journalism or write stuff about Facebook that they at least tried to get it right so I mean that's why having not read all of your book and I read a part of it when when you sent it to me I used appreciate the effort that you put in in terms of spending like all those hours and days talking to dozens of people in the the ecosystem around us it was trying to understand what's going on right so I don't know if I read your book I probably wouldn't agree with everything but at least there's the sense that it's serious journalism right and it's on the same at the same time and there's another book that was written about us that was written by a fiction writer and these guys were you know decided to have a said here alright let's make a movie about Facebook and then she would do choices of books to base it on I mean just just vision on the fiction book in his head just in his defense I mean he did try to interview you for his book the reason why we didn't participate is because it was very clear that it was fiction from the beginning right and we talked to him about that and when I mean he basically told us you know what I'm most interested in is telling the most interesting story right and we want to make sure that we're never that we never participate in something like that so then someone can take something that's really fictional and say and we talk to Mark Zuckerberg for this right so you know I think it's clear that fiction all the book reviews of that book for people who know it say that it's fiction the movie is based on the book I don't really know how much else there is to say do you wish that Justin Timberlake was playing your character no that really would not make a difference one way or another you know the guy who was playing me his cousin works at Facebook he still has a job he is currently the lead designer on newsfeed and and I meet with him you know every week to go through the the next version of what we're building and I mean he's a cool guy or and he's really talented and um you know I I mean I'm sure all the people involved in the movie are talented right so that's cool but I mean the movies fiction I think that that's really the most important and you'll be sort of let it go and hopefully it'll yeah I mean I really believe that all that we can do is focused on building the best thing and that over time people will remember us for what we build right and not what anyone said about us all along the way and I mean maybe that's idealistic I mean maybe I have to think that but that's what I choose to focus on right and what I want to keep the company focused on it but but I think that that means you can't just say I want to ignore things that that sound bad or that that are that are kind of made up about us I think it's really important if you're gonna have that perspective that you also don't pay too much attention when people are saying really good things about you either so I mean they're just we have a really strong sense of the company of what we're trying to do and that's what guides us I mean do you sometimes wish you could just sort of drop out an escape for a moment and get away from the inevitable celebrity that comes with being who you are what you created do you sometimes just think god I just wish I could like shut it off for a day or two days or a week well I mean I can it's called you know hanging out with my friends at home wherever you can I mean you'd be recognized anywhere in my house I mean you can't come to my house right and I mean a lot of my friends now my closest friends are people who have known throughout the whole experience or people who I have who have gotten to know by working with them really closely over the past few years right I mean is an example of one piece of fiction in in the movie I think that they somehow try to portray it as if I'm a building Facebook to get girls and leave somehow that's like the whole theme of the book I haven't read the book and whatever the truth is I've been dating the same girl since before I built Facebook great so you know like a lot of a lot of the people who have been through this story have been consistent throughout you know it's that core group of people who work on it you care about it who are your friends who are really the important people and you know that's a matter it also wait it's not it's a much bigger issue for facebook it's the issue of how media books movies change the image of Mark Zuckerberg and the company is a far smaller issue for them in my opinion then what governments and regulators are going to be saying and doing and this is why I think this issue of you know do you really want to be out there meeting with David Cameron every week like you did the other day that's what you're gonna have to be doing because whether you like it or not I don't think the movie really matters in the grand scheme of things from a standpoint of Facebook's success or failure I do think when you are maintaining and all this identity information for people and you're getting into areas where governments feel very threatened and this issue of privacy is of such great concern in so many jurisdictions this is a real issue I think the movie is something of a distraction and I honestly would like to hear more about how you think you're gonna handle this issue I mean we've seen it with the privacy regularly the Commissioner of Canada you guys negotiated with them for a full year and then she got mad again after you did the recent stuff you know and and the EU is coming at you and and Australian governments coming at you and they said this isn't real that you must think about that don't you yeah I think that they're important to have and you know there are all these folks that we work with or I mean we work with and we obviously mostly listen to what our users want both in terms of what they do and what they tell us we work with a whole set of nonprofit organizations who are the voice of users on privacy issues and security issues and things like that and we interface with governments and you know what I find more often than not is that all of these people are reasonable right and they all are doing what they're doing because they think it's good for the world right no one is coming out this with bad intentions so I think the key is just to engage with all these people who are trying to have this real discourse around serious issues and try to come to the right issues where the internet isn't stopping right so are you personally willing to engage in that to the degree I think it's really going to be necessary for the CEO of Facebook whether it's you or somebody else to spend a very substantial percentage of their time doing that and I wonder whether you want to do that I mean Larry and Sergey hired Eric Schmidt and this is I say question people ask me all the time are you gonna hire that kind of a person because you really are a product guy you know I don't know whether you I heard you did a great job with Cameron by the way and the whole cabinet that's very cool and maybe that is what you are we're going to want to do more of and I'm not saying you can't succeed at convincing them of a lot of things you're talking about up here but there are enormous misconceptions abroad about Facebook's reality and intentions and when you are operating in literally every country on the planet except for North Korea China and Cuba and a few others you know you're gonna have these issues coming at you day in and day out yeah and I think the strategy is as follows I mean we have a great team of people who are just top-notch in this field right I mean we we hire the best engineers and product folks we also hire great policy thinkers because a big part of what we're doing is shaping Internet policy right and how and how that plays out over time through our products right and and we're not the last chapter this the internet will not stop right the Internet is gonna keep on going these issues are gonna be important issues and we want to make sure that we engage with the people who are having this debate to make sure that everyone gets to the right place I think that the great people that we have on our team are actually going to be able to do a lot of it now in terms of these companies I don't know if the model of hiring a CEO to be externally facing while the people who are making a lot of the decisions aren't that person is really a viable model Reming this technology companies really are product companies and a lot of the most important decisions I think all of the most important decisions come down to what you're offering to the people that you serve or who your users and the end right and I think that that's the most important thing right so we need to make sure that we handle all these things as part of the team and that's why we spend a lot of time just trying to get the most talented folks on all of these different realms to join us but I think for the long term and it gets back to what I was saying before about how I don't think we're anywhere near the end of developing the platform the platform decisions we make the product decisions the technology decisions we make are going to be the most important decisions we make over the next five or ten years and I think that that's what the roles are in in the book David describes a leather-bound notebook that you start carrying around in 2005 used to scrawl notes in it and as as you know far back is 2005 you laid out your vision for the newsfeed for opening registration to everyone opening facebook up to apps by outside developers all of those things happened what's in your book today or if you're not keeping a book anymore what what are you thinking about what's swirling around in your head I think I've talked about a lot of it but I mean the the platform stuff I think is just there's so much more to do what should users of Facebook expect to see in you know the coming years is actually a good question here that ties into this I mean you know will we be able to make phone calls or do two-way video chats or get CNN video for example 24/7 on Facebook is that a possibility well I don't know if the goal is to get that inside facebook.com right well I think what people should expect over the next five years is that virtually every important service that you use online but eventually offline to are going to get remade and designed from the bottom up with people at their Center now that might happen from forward-leaning incumbents and those spaces or it might happen through disruption through new entrepreneurs who are structurally have more of an incentive to take risks and just will overturn things like we're seeing with games now but I think that that's what's gonna be exciting right so we have a lot of work that we need to do to make sure that we build out that kind of plumbing properly right in that we build all the products on facebook well enough to handle all of the different types of information that people are going to want to share and that are gonna be flowing through the system but if we can do that then you can imagine the world is gonna look a lot different right I mean everything from how we get news which won't necessarily be on Facebook but maybe you know the CNN of the future the New York Times of the future just looks a lot more social right instead of just getting the pics that are from editors you get pics from the people who you trust the most and who have similar interests and the whole newspapers personalized to the things that you've said that you're interested in you know we've already seen experiences where you can go to internet radio on Pandora and it just automatically starts playing the songs that you like right with you without you having to do anything because it's personalized and you can turn it off if you don't want that experience but it's a great experience um we of course in our business know that there are major consequences for that as well and they're gonna be good so I'm gonna turn to some questions from some especially you know there is no question that what he's saying should be listened to by anybody who's concerned about the future of Facebook Facebook's goal and strategy is not to be a website long term they are very consistent about it mark and his extension earing and product people all say the same thing the platform is Facebook's future and that's basically what he's saying that you know it won't happen inside the confines of facebook.com Facebook is aiming to be a set of services that are applicable to people no matter what they do and it really will extend beyond the internet itself it's gonna be on your web on your phone or your mobile device you're gonna carry with you and you're gonna apply it increasingly everything you do if he gets what he's trying to build you know implemented that's you know I think if we don't succeed at building it someone else will so III think I just think that this is likely the way that things are gonna go if for no other reason that we've seen that every single app that has been built in designed with this methodology of building of design around people is significantly more engaging and grows faster than all the other types of apps that haven't right now that doesn't mean that you can do it poorly and have it work but but whenever there are good entrepreneurs whether it's folks who work at Facebook on photos or groups or events or the folks who are tackling games now or people are working on e-commerce stuff in the future when people hit that it's gonna work and you know we can be the the platform that provides that I think we're certainly in the lead now but we're not near the end right so there's a lot of room for innovation left and we need to keep on moving in that direction if we want to help support this mark yeah I got to get to some of these questions because there's some very good ones here here's one I like it's the question is as CEO when was the last time you actually wrote code for Facebook or not well why don't you the antibiotics again are now no no I mean you know all the time for fun I think it's really important you use your own products right so for example you know I use facebook.com/ all the time I use the the mobile versions right I have an iPhone and I have an Android phone because I think it's important to use all these different things if you want to build a platform you also have to be a user of that that means writing code right so on the weekends sometimes I do the most recent time that I checked in code for facebook.com was actually for the platform as well leading up to f8 which was in late April this year that's our annual developer event the the platform team was just kind of sitting there and they had this big monitor on the wall with the number of bugs that they had left to fix um and it was like there's like a hundred and fifty three nights before and everyone was like pulling all-nighters constantly and it's like all right you know I already written my keynote I'll help out right so and you know I figure that's like pretty good for morale right I mean you get like the people right and Shrek joined in right over our head of engineering and we just kind of sat there and we fixed some bugs and we wrote tests to make sure it was gonna be stable when it launched and it was fun right and it's also good because so much of the infrastructure of what we do requires having good code and good abstractions that actually being in there and being able to see the work that people are doing on a day to day basis just gives us a much clearer sense of kind of the investments that we need to be making to run the company better to build better products of the long term what are the issues or things that keep you up at night I mean the main thing is just that it just kind of gets back to this theme of there's so much more to do and I mean we're just this little company I mean we have you know fifteen hundred people now so we're have really worth twenty seven billion you know I mean who cares the I measure it first and I measure it in terms of the number of the number of people who are working on it right and there are 400 engineers of the company and right now about 150 really excited interns who are writing code but I mean that's it right I mean there's no other organization on the face of the earth that has 500 million people that it's serving with 400 people writing code for that so I think the biggest question when you look at the ecosystem and if you come to the conclusion that I have that we are not near the end right we are not in maintenance mode there's a lot more innovation there are a lot more people I mean 500 people in 500 million people may be using the service today but I think this is something that over time everyone is gonna want to use right everyone has friends and family and wants to stay connected with those people and they you know and so we have a lot more work that we need to do to get it there the question is just how do we get there right and are we moving fast enough and how can we move faster so I mean we do all these things and we try to be bold and we try to move quickly but I actually think the biggest challenge might be maybe how can we move even faster because you see other people creeping up I mean not it's just that the opportunity is so big right I mean I think if we if we fail then inevitably that will happen but you know I I think that there are companies that their primary dynamic that they're primarily limited by competition right in there and more of a zero-sum market where you know they're win directly means someone else's loss I see that as much of us I mean I think that there are competitors and that's important and we want to look out and see what good things other people are doing this we can learn from them but it's not zero sum I mean there were a couple of years ago there were many fewer people using Facebook now there are a lot more in a few years there will be a lot more people using social networks it's our job to make sure that we build the best one so it's Facebook that they're using and but the the segment is growing right this behavior in the world is growing I just want to make sure that we do our best at at kind of getting the world there in David's book he describes so the evolution of of how you dealt with being the CEO being you know 22 and now 26 and working with people older than you your CEO obviously subtly 14 years older than you what in your opinion this is a question from the audience that makes a successful entrepreneur why why are some people why did you become a successful entrepreneur rather than others who had great ideas who had some success but then failed what do you think you did different and are you still learning how to be a CEO well so I think they're actually two different things being an entrepreneur and being a CEO I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because I mean it's obviously it's a very important thing for me to reflect on um and in talking to the folks around me and what I really think it comes down to are two key things for building something well one is just having a really strong sense of what you want to do right because along the way there are so many distractions that if you're not completely clear on what you want to do you're gonna get sidetracked I was watching this interview with Steve Jobs once where where he was basically an entrepreneur as Tim for advice it's like what would you say to me as an entrepreneur and his advice was make sure that you really love and care about what you're doing because if you don't it's so irrational the amount of time and energy that you have to put into building what you're gonna build that it's just not worth doing and you're gonna you're gonna fall off at some point along the way so I think that's number one is kind of being clear about what you want to do and really caring about it number two is building a good team right and like that's what I spend a huge time on you know when I'm not building products and and I don't even really build products anymore I work with teams to build products so I mean it goes all the way down the organization from a really good head of engineering who can scale out and really get the respective the best hackers and and engineers and people who want to build stuff too ahead of product who can really communicate exactly what you're going to do to make sure that every person in your company knows exactly what the plan is to really good business folks like Cheryl who you know and keep it when any of these people could run the company I mean it to the to the question before but like should I be running the company or not but if I were to disappear any of them could run the company and I just think that that's a really important thing when you're trying to build something is you need to you need to get great people around you right so but I think if you if you have a clear idea of what you're doing and you have great people then your that's a lot of the battle you know the scope of the vision that he had from the beginning was quite extraordinary I think that in his case was a secret sauce element but it's really interesting that he has been able to hire people from the time women from getting Sean Parker you know all the way through to Cheryl and all the amazing senior leaders that he has now who really share the vision I mean the scope of the vision to begin with was very very very big and he's done an amazingly good job like finding people who are good at all sorts of sub segments of the tasks who also share the scope of the vision that's kind of if I were talking to if you could mimic that you're gonna have a successful company and do you still I mean do you still sort of study how to be a CEO I mean do you still think about what you need to do and what you need to learn to do that job yeah I started this when I was 19 I knew nothing right so I mean when I moved out I was so lucky in terms of just happening to meet the right people who could help us with the simplest things about building a company meeting venture capitalists to have seed investments so you don't have to keep on spending all of your college tuition doing a contract to set up a data center right I mean I took computer science classes none of them were on how to set up a data center um so yeah I mean we've made probably every mistake that you can make and you know I like at the company and yeah I I think that you know if the plan plays out right in if the next five years are as exciting as the last five or six have been then they're gonna be a lot of hard decisions to make and we better spend a lot of time thinking about how to get those right and we're gonna get a lot of them wrong and we better learn from that so yeah yeah this out like this question says you are always asked the same questions in every interview about privacy and data and are there any questions that you wished people would ask you would you wish what would you wish that that I asked you or that David and there's this odd dynamic in these interviews where the stuff that I'm most excited about at any point in time is what we're building now and I can't talk about it right I mean we can talk about the future but I I mean I think yeah I mean I think we've we've touched on a lot of those topics I don't know maybe I don't spend enough time thinking about that because I'm too busy answering the questions that I don't want but it's but it's but but it is part of the price you pay for pursuing openness and transparency which i think is a good thing but at the same time their responsibilities that come with with the pursuit of those ideas right I mean fair enough isn't it are you talking about just doing interviews and things like that yeah I mean it's definitely important I think as the company is scaled to make sure that all the people who use our service every day which I mean is actually perhaps one of the most amazing statistics about Facebook I mean we talked about you know we just reached 500 million people are using Facebook we've always had this crazy stat that more than 50% of our users use the site every day that's still true it's still true yeah and we figured it would know as we got into people who use computers less that would stopping true but it hasn't actually in the last year there the percent has gone up which I guess means we're doing a good job what is the first it varies so I mean I don't want to give a specific number but it's it you can say it's a little more than 50% use it every day where do you see the largest growth potential by the way well I mean there are different countries right so for a while our strategy was just kind of see where it grew we had no targeted marketing or anything like that that's an interesting thing about Facebook too is we we don't do broadcast or even we're not we're not trying to market ourselves the way that the site grows is because people tell their friends that they should be on it and then they get their friends on it so the whole marketing for the service is us basically giving people the tools that they need to get the people that they want on to the site so we never until very recently targeted a specific country as a place that we wanted to grow in what we've started off in colleges and then from very early on we just we basically took requests I mean people emailed instead okay launch it at this college and then when we had servers early on I mean we I was renting servers for $85 we put ads up when we had enough money we rented more servers when we had more enough servers to have more capacity we basically stack rank the colleges that wanted to get on Facebook and by the number of requests that people had sent us and we opened up to those colleges first when we made it's that anyone could sign up we built a tool so that users themselves could translate the service so basically we had this thing where we opened it up and within two weeks all of our users had submitted and voting on a voted on all these translations to translate every single string of text of which there are tens of thousands into Spanish and then we opened it up to French and they translated it in one day I guess they really passionate about their language and and and and that's kind of how it grew and you know people who wanted it in their country did the effort to get it in their country now it's only recently that we that were doing more targeted things and the reason for that is that we ran out of countries you know we I mean they're they're really there are there are a couple of countries where we aren't yet the leader but I think the trajectory is pretty clear that we will be like Brazil India we just we just passed the the previous leader there so there are really only four countries that we're not the leading social network service and it's Japan Russia Korea South Korea and and China so we're so we're focused on that now and this year we're focused on Japan and Russia we have three engineers we're just like all right we've never done anything like this we want to just get parachute parachuted into Japan and we want to just rent an apartment and code and go rogue and it's like alright go for it and they're working on that and you know in Japan I think we're already more than a million people and they've been there for six or nine months so that's going pretty well so that's one area for growth or the countries that we haven't yet yet really gotten into but the other one is just making its that everyone uses the service right so I mean we've seen countries get up to as much as you know 80% of the internet population on Facebook and the theory is that it really is a universal service right basically everyone has friends and family and they want to stay connected to those people right so people ask us these questions all the time of how do people use it differently in different countries how do people use it differently of different ages and the thing that's crazy isn't how people use it differently it's how similarly they all use it some of their differences or a differences here and there I mean there are different applications that people use in different countries but by and large it's really similar and I think that that's why something like this will end up being extremely universal so you know there are countries where we're at 80% of the internet population or on Facebook and there are countries like the US where I think we're around 130 million people who are using it and there's a lot more to grow so that's I think it's just gonna be really interesting over the next few years and this is one of the challenges at the company that's really fun is we get to build products both for countries where there are no users yet and for countries where a huge amount of people are on are on the service and the real challenge is getting people who barely use their computers to be able to ramp up and wire up in a social network mark last summer the State Department reportedly asked Twitter to delay a routine maintenance average and that was during the Iranian street protests demonstrations against the election re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if the government asked Facebook to do the same to allow people to have access to a site where they can post information and videos and and and other material would you do that would you honor that request you know I think it depends on on what it is exactly I mean so we've never had that exact situation that they were in and we've had had other ones but you know it is really interesting some of the most interesting use cases that we've seen have been of people using Facebook for purposes right something there's this example I think you cover in the foreword of your book right well Oscar morrow yeah and basically in Columbia right there was the FARC right and a lot of people in the country or really opposed to to that group but I guess the group has a massive amount of control over media and there was never before Facebook and outlet for people to to organize or to express their um their concern about it and this one guy was pretty brave and he went out there and he made a group and it was pretty easy to do and he started spreading it and before long one book fellated yeah all cities across the right even protesting FARC and far could recently taken hostages and and there were a lot of other things going on around the time so I don't think that he really claims credit for this but I think that this was one of the things that put pressure on that organization to release the hostages which they ended up doing and I think things like that that like large-scale political movements are pretty interesting to see play out in this new medium and I mean so it's all the stuff right it's YouTube it's Twitter its Facebook and all this other stuff that's gonna get built on top of these social platforms going forward but I know it's one of the really gratifying things about building this is right we get to be just a part of kind of empowering people to do those things that they couldn't do before I think one of the most interesting things about Facebook is the tension that it's in so many countries literally every country pretty much and so many of those countries are not truly free and democratic and yet the cut governments let the internet operate and let Facebook operate and attention is developing in a number of countries which I consider extremely healthy which Facebook is playing a very prominent role in you know in countries like Egypt where it's been playing out very dramatically just in recent weeks but you see it in you know in different ways in India you know Bangladesh even and certainly in Venezuela Colombia you know it's really really interesting that a I'm gonna say Facebook is a platform for the empowerment of its members and one of the things that I think people don't appreciate about the difference between Facebook and Twitter is that people get on Twitter to be broadcasters right but people get on Facebook to say let's meet at the mall right but once they get on Facebook to meet at the mall they happen to have acquired a broadcast platform that when they get upset about something political they have at their disposal so ordinary people find themselves in control of this political tool at the very moment when they need it and it is not something a lot of governments are gonna be that comfortable about going forward and I think that's great where do you draw the line mark as you know in Pakistan for some time the government blocked Facebook there was a page set up by somebody it was a call to submit your cartoons of Muhammad I mean are you ever worried that you might be sort of you know targeted by by some group that that feels well you know you're in charge of this company and you haven't shut it down well actually I think someone is trying to get me sentenced to death and Pakistan now that's not a joke I mean it might be funny but it's not a joke I mean this is where I think you were asking before what you have to do to build something like this you have to really believe in what you're doing right I mean we think that what we're doing is a really valuable thing in the world and I hope I don't get killed I mean obviously there are restrictions on pornography how do you sort of decide I mean I know there's a policy but you know how do you sort of decide what what skirts align and what does it you know one of the approaches that we take is I think that there are a lot of country a company sorry that um that now we're serving a very international user base but really espouse American values right and to a point where I think it's almost um you know it's like almost closed-minded right how much they they only have American values and write off the values of other countries and you know I think with our user base right and then the community of people that are using Facebook we really have as a goal to be an international company right we have seventy percent of people who are using Facebook outside of of the US and like you were saying different countries have different standards for what what what hate speech is right so so for example in the u.s. we have one standard in Germany it's illegal to post anything with Nazi content but it's a law it's it's it's in law you can't post anything with Nazi content and and that's the decision that they made because they felt it was very sensitive after World War two right and so our stance is that we respect that if it's a law right different countries have different stances on what hate speech is right now if Germany came to us and said don't allow Nazi content anywhere around the world that would be ridiculous right and some people have never been blog posts written about this like why does Facebook allow Holocaust denial and things like that especially when you know person running the company is Jewish and it's like because we believe in free speech so that's why we do that but we also don't want to take an American centric approach to it right so where we get really where we really where we think that we draw the line as you know when a country has a clear standard that's written into law and isn't just being arbitrarily enacted right by the country but but I think these are some of the really interesting questions that that have to get resolved over time but I think that for this next wave of companies I mean there's so many more people outside of the US than inside the US I think you want to have that global perspective right that you know we believe in certain things if we believe that openness and transparency and free speech are good and that giving people the tools to share things are generally gonna be valuable all over the world but we also believe that you should respect other cultures so I don't that's that's our take last question for you mark before we we have to wrap up on paper of course we all know that you are a billionaire you're very wealthy guy or you have the potential to admit to be if you if you see if you sold the company and head up opportunities where do you see yourself in 20 years and beyond I mean with with your name on buildings of public philanthropy following in the footsteps of Bill Gates running a different company even living here in in Silicon Valley yeah it's funny to think about I think you guys are know Kevin Rose he's the the founder and CEO of Digg and he once had this awesome quote that you know there's this story on the front page of it was Business Week it was like how this kid made 80 million dollars or 60 million dollars in two years and he was like hey this is ridiculous this is a private company and say I don't have any money and he does this podcast or this are this weekly video or sits on a couch with another guy and they they talk about whatever the biggest issues are there facing Digg and someone asked him what he thought of that that piece and he was you know it's funny it's like I'm not a millionaire there's I'm not even a thousandaire I had to borrow money to buy the couch that we're sitting on so you know I don't know in terms of that I really I don't think it affects me I did once hear mark asked Jim Breyer for a raise because he was moving into a bigger so I mean so the most important thing to me and this is maybe I kind of a funny story is I just want to live within walking distance of our office all right it's California it's beautiful I wanna be able to walk to work and we moved offices from from downtown Palo Alto University Ave to California and to get a bigger building so we can have everyone in one place and we had to so we moved to this new place and I just wanted a new apartment that was within walking distance of the office so you know so my assistant was looking for for an apartment for weeks and weeks and weeks and finally I was out traveling somewhere and I get this phone call and she calls me and goes alright I found an apartment I'm renting it oh sorry I found it I found a small house I'm renting it so I literally like I haven't even seen the house before I moved in um because like I don't care right I mean like I don't so anytime there I'm at the office the whole time right like why would a build to do is build to walk home at the end of the day sleep and then go back to the office so I don't know that's me that's me like that's an ending 20 and in 20 years from now I'm in Bill Gates I'm Atlanta P I I think we'll see I think we'll see I like I I really care about what we're doing I think there's a lot more to do I think the this trend towards people sharing more towards the world becoming more open and transparent is I think one of the most transformative things in society over the next 10 or 15 years maybe longer who knows but that's what we're focused on there's a lot more to do it's really exciting Mark Zuckerberg David Kirkpatrick good

Channel: Computer History Museum

Views: 291,374

Rating: 4.7928438 out of 5

Keywords: Computer, History, Museum, Facebook, Effect, CEO, Mark, Zuckerberg, Internet, Social, Networking, Privacy, Silicon, Valley, David, Kirkpatrick, Harvard, Strategy

Id: _TuFkupUn7k

Length: 93min 54sec (5634 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2010