Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012

welcome everybody I'm bigger yeah yeah here you guys are too okay so um these are the questions that I was curious about um and I think they'll be the questions you guys are curious about too I'm gonna ask a lot about the very early days of Facebook home we were just talking about them in the back it was fascinating wish you could have heard it oh oh we'll do our best to try and reproduce it um so here's a question that might be a little bit difficult um how long before 2004 could something like Facebook have succeeded like what was the last thing that was needed to fall into place could someone have done it in 1995 or 2000 yeah no it's an interesting question um there were certain elements that we certainly bootstrapped off of and kind of used to hack early identity right so one of the things that that people don't think about that often today is early on we wanted to establish this culture of real identity on the service and you know there weren't really any other online services or communities where people were openly their their real self before that and one of the ways that we kind of determined that someone was really who they said they were and their credentials were real where everyone had school email addresses and I don't know how much before 2004 assume you know probably around 2000 all schools started issuing email addresses but that was really this critical thing that made it so that we could get servers this counterintuitive thing that um not many other services were using so school email addresses were the original source of identity well that's how he knew what school you were in right and then you weren't just a sock puppet because you can't just get the school to keep yeah exactly yeah meal address yeah yeah yeah so it also admits that people couldn't sign up for fake accounts right right people typically only have one school account so having being able to bootstrap off of that was this really nice early thing that that helped us establish this culture of real identity and once we got to a few million people or 10 million people where that culture was established it was able to bootstrap into something that was much bigger that kept most of that culture even though now obviously most people in the world don't have emails that are issued by some institution that vouch this or their identity now people log in through Facebook now you are the source of high density well you know it comes around yeah but you know but but to your question about when would it have been possible you know one of the big trends that we see is that the amount that any individual shares in a given year seems to be growing of this exponentially increasing rate right Berg's law yeah I don't call it that but but other people do you heard in your first but um you know I I mean it is this kind of social networking version of Moore's law and it's interesting and you know what that suggests to me is you know if we expect that this rate is going to double every year then you know look out 10 years to to the 10th is 1024 right so 10 years from now people will be sharing about a thousand times as many things you know better adhesion next year I feel like everything will be cool anyway I just have a good I have a good feeling about today I don't think that's a bad omen no that's wonderful um Sonia so I think the question is not would Facebook have not been possible before 2004 it would have been in some capacity but people would have shared less and if you fast forward five years there's going to be a version of there gonna be all these social services that people are using to share way more and I think that anyone here could be can kind of think about you know K ten years from now people are gonna be sharing a thousand times as much stuff a day if this if this trend continues what's what things are gonna have to exist in the world what kind of services are gonna have to exist in order for that to be possible Instagram for toilets um that's the final frontier I mean Instagram is killing it I mean they're they're doing really well so that's a good frontier all right when you first launched in the very beginning the features were sort of profile with like a profile photo and your name and who you are and also you included things like what house you lived in what dorm you lived in um and what courses you were taking do you think it would have worked without that would it have been enough just to have profiles you know it's a really interesting question and we certainly since then have evolved and wanted to make a more general service so we've dropped some of those things but I remember um there's this early debate that Dustin and I had where we had to do some manual work for every school that we we're earliest Facebook ad and in order to do that we basically went through and we parsed the course catalogs of the schools to make sure the data was clean and um and I remember having this debate where Dustin was like we could just expend so much faster or it would just be easier I mean we were bound by server capacity but it would be easier to launch new schools if we didn't have to have course catalogs for each school and we just had this really long debate about what quality meant for us and the community that we wanted to establish and in the culture of it and you know in retrospect you know maybe you wouldn't have had a huge difference on how things played out but it definitely kind of set this tone where there's a lot of kind of clean data on Facebook you can rely on it it feels like a college specific thing yeah which was valuable early on for setting the culture even though obviously since then we've grown beyond that and you know I think you guys in the projects that you work on you're gonna have a lot of similar questions right I mean there's the the famous 80/20 rule where you know you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work but you can't just 80/20 everything right I mean there have to be certain things that you just are the best at right and that you go way further than anyone else had to establish this kind of quality bar and have your product be the best thing that's out there so you know whether we had to do that one or had to do something we had to do I think enough of those things or else we just wouldn't been the best service out there do you remember when you got rid of courses when did you stop part including course Kaizen probably when we expanded beyond colleges really so you kept doing courses yeah all through girls was like hundreds of colleges um I think we eventually figured out a way that just crowd-sourced and made it a bit easier once we had enough data that we could extrapolate from the colleges that we had in place but we did it for probably way longer than was rational hmm do you do you remember how much your first server cost you said oh yeah $85 $85 yeah and I remember that because that was the gating factor for us launching new schools I I mean we had this philosophy from the very beginning that we didn't want to be this project it wasn't even a company at the very beginning but we didn't want to be burning a lot of money right we weren't planning on raising a lot of money we didn't want to be one of these things that raised a bunch of money and you know was losing a bunch of money and then decided that we'd somehow pull it through at the end and um so you know so $85 for the first server put ads on the site and the ads at the beginning where we just were running some kind of ad network and you murder what the first ad was um no I don't I don't how do I get ads um this was Eduardo's job Verizon was I mean he was your ad sales he yeah he basically like he was responsible for making sure that we had enough money to keep things running in the beginning and you know basically I mean so it was the server was $85 and you know Dustin and I basically worked on kind of efficiency and making sure that we can fit more schools onto each server and and Eduardo worked on selling more ads or making a deals that we can get ad network so that way we can we can make more money then whenever we had more money we rented another $85 a month server and we kind of went from there and some interesting way of soo never spent money you didn't have in the beginning not in the beginning no and then I mean even why was the constraint on your growth rate how many new $85 is you could get yeah and I mean it was actually good because I mean you know sometimes it's really nice to have the time to get your product to be awesome and deal with scaling problems and one of the things that was interesting was um you know at the time I don't know how many people remember this but I mean Friendster was the service that had massive scaling problems yeah you know the idea was they were they grew quickly and it was really hard for them to scale and you know the fact that we could kind of go college by college and and kind of optimize the service and make it more efficient and offer new features but make sure that they worked I think was really key I mean we're you're talking about people who never built a company before we never built any large-scale software or anything so having the period where we could just bake it and you know people these days like to talk about how these services grow super quickly then Facebook did grow quickly but I think it took a year for us to get a million users and we thought that that was incredibly fast but and and I think it is but it wasn't as quick as a lot of things grow today and I think actually having that time to bake it was really valuable for and there were like two thousand users at Harvard that's 500x in a year that's pretty fast well they're I think around 4,000 or 5,000 undergrads at Harvard I remember reading you got half of them I mean presumably well no there was two-thirds or three-quarters or something in the first two weeks so I mean the thing that we found was that basically we opened it up at a school and and within you know a couple of weeks then the vast majority of students would it would be on the surface was there a school ever that you opened it and it didn't work it didn't stick um some schools took longer than others depending on the size of the school so what we basically did was so I launched it at Harvard first because I wanted it right haven't I built it for myself I like I really want to be able to use the service and you know this is one of the ironies is I started building Facebook because I wanted to use it in college and then I immediately left college so I didn't really get to do that but um just expand it to everybody else outside no yeah so it worked out but you know so then after Harvard all these schools started well a lot of students from other schools started writing to us and asking for us to expand and we weren't looking to start a company right and I figured that eventually something like this would would exist at large scale but you know one of the one of the interesting juxtapositions that was going on at the time was I remember distinctly I had this one friend who I went and got pizza with almost every night we did all our computer science problem sets together at Harvard and at the time I remember talking to him about how I was working on this Facebook thing and I thought it would be cool for Harvard and I really was excited about it because I wanted to use it but at the same time how I thought that over time someone would definitely go build this version of this for the world but it wasn't gonna be us it was going to be you know Microsoft or you know someone who built the software for hundreds of millions of people it's like who were we word college student sorry we're not qualified in any way to build this and I think a lot of my take away from that was that we just kind of cared more than those other companies about making it exist so anyhow but back to your it back to your kind of question and off that tangent the first set of schools that we launched out after Harvard were schools that had other kind of school specific social network so I think it was Stanford had something Columbia had something and I think Yale had something so why would you choose ones that had school specific social network because I wanted to editors well I wanted to go to the schools I thought would be the hardest for us to succeed at because I knew that if we had a product that was better than everything else that other students were making at other colleges then it would be worth investing in and putting putting time into but I didn't want to just kind of like get into a project where they would end up being this huge legacy of maintaining it if ultimately they were just going to be different things that were as good as it so and we thought that this was going to be good and you know we launched it at it was Yale Stanford Columbia and and yeah I mean pretty quickly I think it just so you felt probably that you could have just gone to some random school and it would have succeeded you chose those because they had nascent competitors yeah I mean I think what we saw at those schools was people wanted to use something like this right so we just wanted to make sure that what we had was like way better than anything else that was out there worth you know putting time into do you think I know I read in the crimson article about when you first launched hundreds of people sign up for new hundreds hundreds sign up for new Facebook website that is not the onion that is the crimson all sometimes hard to distinguish um Harvard students huh um okay so uh do you think though they said in this article that Harvard the Harvard Computer Services people were working on at university wide Facebook their problem was to like they couldn't figure out how to restrict information enough right um do you think if that had already existed if you had been a couple years younger and he would come to Harvard and this already existed do you think you would have ever started Facebook I don't know I mean there's this trend that I was talking about before where each year people share more and more right so I think that you can kind of math out at any given point and I think you can look at the the internet and say okay there's enough sharing to support certain products right so Wikipedia came really before Facebook because there was a smaller amount of sharing could support information about all the public entities and railed right but in order to have enough sharing to support some basic information so you can look up anyone and find some interesting stuff about them then that that required more sharing so we had to be further along this curve and you know made a couple years earlier someone might have been able to do something that was more basic but a couple years later even a couple years from now someone will be able to build something that is just so much more encompassing and allows people to learn so much more about the people around them than what is even built today so our kind of continual mission and job is to keep on building that next thing and I mean that's what we live for at Facebook and what excites us so even if Harvard even if the university had built something there would always you could have built the next thing yeah and it's obviously always hard to tell exactly how things would have played out but I mean one of the interesting things about Facebook was it wasn't just a picture and some basic info and it pretty quickly gave people the ability to share more stuff right now and one of the early stories that I think is pretty instructor for anyone who's trying to build a startup is you know we really listen to what our users wanted right in listening means both kind of qualitatively listening to the words that they say and quantitatively looking at the behaviors that they take and you know at the beginning we we had one profile picture that you could have on your on your profile that on what we observed was there was this behavior where a lot of people would everyday upload a new profile picture and you know our takeaway from this was that you know people there was this very strong demand to have a service where people could share more photos and it actually wasn't until we had the server capacity and the engineering team bandwidth to actually build a full photo sharing service but that that's become obviously one of the key parts of Facebook I think we're over three or four hundred million photos shared a day now someone it's pretty crazy but you know obviously no Facebook that that any university would have built would have supported that right and you know even just like that right or it's kind of really nice right yeah any incremental I mean they would have just had whatever mug shot you have on your your card right would have been your picture so they would have chosen the picture yeah you can keep which is in the picture yeah I can totally see how it would have been um do you remember when you first showed up in college what you plan to do afterwards do you think you were gonna go to graduate school or did you think you were going to get a job when I first went to college I actually was planning on being a classics major I loved classics and and and high school Latin and Greek I just found it fascinating and my sister actually did go on and do that just now PhD student in classics and we talked about this all the time it just still fascinating to me when I was in college I actually wasn't a computer science major I was a psychology major I didn't really get around to taking that many classes because I left pretty quickly and I actually ended up taking more computer science classes than than psychology classes but I was never you know I don't know so you had no plan no I mean you're gonna be a barista no I probably would have um I probably would have gotten an engineering job is my sense and I you'd have gotten sucked in deprogramming uh well I mean I like programming and I really you know growing up I always had a lot of respect for for Microsoft and what they built and a lot of people from Harvard go to Microsoft and went to Microsoft and I maybe I would have done that I don't know it's it's really obviously hard to say later I made this bet with my sister Donna the six PhD I was talking about before who um I bet her when I was starting college before she was that or she bet me that she would finish college before me and and I was like all right that's I'll take that bad it's a good story I don't know and um and then after after when I dropped out I was talking to my mom and she's like ya know I always knew you would drop out of college I was gonna thanks mom so they need I don't know you know notice that you would zoom out of the top or fall out of the bottom I never asked me that do you think your parents knew that you would always like run your own show cuz you asked them I think they'd probably say yes but yeah I did you want to start startups no and I mean I think that's actually a really interesting part of this for me is and I mean being in a place like this we're obviously a lot of you guys are thinking about starting these starting companies and you know for me so much of the lesson that that I I feel like I've learned is I feel like it's really hard to decide to start a company right you know Facebook I didn't start it to start a company I started it because I really wanted this thing personally and I believe that it should exist globally although I wasn't quite sure that that we would be able to play a role in doing that and um it was mostly just through kind of like wanting to build it and having it be this hobby and getting people around me excited that it eventually kind of evolved into and got the momentum to become a company but I never really understood the psychology of deciding that you want to start a company before you understand what you want to do and then I know that that's not that that's different from your philosophy on them no no believe me I wish we would get more people who-who where the company started them rather than vice-versa none of the issues is just it once you this gets back to the question of why did we why did we first open it at colleges that had competitors I have this big fear I think of getting locked into doing things that aren't actually the most impactful things I'm to me this is like the trait that entrepreneurs have is they just have this like laser-like ability to go find where they can have the most impact and you know when you take on a new project especially if you hire people or start a company you're doing that project and I mean there are ways they're obviously different ways that it can exit and all that but I think having the flexibility to explore a lot of different things which you can do when you're in college which is one of the amazing things about being in college is you can work on all these hobbies and and encode a lot of stuff and try a lot of different things it's this amazing flexibility that I think most people take for granted and once you decide okay I'm going to start a company and I'm gonna do it with someone else you immediately now need to convince someone else if you want to change your mind on something and I think people really undervalued the option value in flexibility so as I stay in college um I think explore what you want to do before committing is really like the key thing and keep yourself flexible and know I think that that's yeah I agree yeah but but I think in it you can definitely do that within the framework of a company but I think you have to be wary about starting a company too rigidly because you're gonna change what you do I mean people talk about pivots all the time as if it's like it didn't didn't your thing didn't work so you pivoted Facebook pivoted many times I mean just that you know we kind of work college and then we were not college and then we were just a website and then we were a platform right and um you're gonna change what you do right and oh you're a minister you have there's another word for the kind of pivots you're talking about expansions well it that's not what people usually mean by pivoting well you know high flexibility yeah um I'm curious when you first started like there's a difference between making something where people sign up and making something where people keep coming back yeah right what was it you were talking about the way you measured people's behavior what was the feature that kept people coming back to Facebook over and over again once they created their profile I mean I think it really just gets down to what makes humans human right I mean like this comes back to the my studying psychology and all that but I mean the human brain is is kind of uniquely wired to process things about people right it's like when I see when I look out I see faces I don't see you know chairs or the room around people it's like we're hardwired to think about people I mean there are whole parts of you know the visual cortex that just process the slightest kind of micro movements of your face to process emotion and this is like what people are and what fascinates them and it's how we how we process the world actually I heard the study in recently that I think is interesting which is that most humans if you if you take an MRI when they're dreaming they dream about social interactions and humans are the only animal that does that so now okay but there was no service online that I mean it when I when I thought about the internet before Facebook there were all these things I thought Google and search engines were amazing right you can type in something and get access to any information that you wanted but you couldn't learn about the people around you right and because most of that information isn't public and just out there ready to be indexed by by some search engine so answer had to be a service that gave people the power to share the things that they wanted and control it in the way that they wanted and and Facebook did that and I think that it's you know one one um definition of technology that I think is interesting is it extends some natural human capacity right so glasses or contacts extend your ability to see right Steve Jobs once famously compared a computer to being a bicycle for your mind right and basically extending your ability to think and I mean the word computer is the Latin think together right so it's like you're you're thinking together the social network I think extends people's very real social capacity I mean you hear all these um approximations I mean there's this famous Dunbar's number humans have the capacity to maintain empathetic relationships with about a hundred fifty people communities about a hundred fifty people I think Facebook extends that where you see evidence of that within Facebook by the way do you see certain things that stop at one hundred and fifty um naturally when people sign up the average amount of friends that they get is around 150 but then over time it can expand and you can keep in touch and stay in touch with many more people so I think it's like so given that I actually think one of the lessons from that is I do something that's fundamental right I mean I think a lot of people in a lot of the companies that I see are operating on on small problems right and um it's cool if you want to be an entrepreneur and salva and what you're primarily trying to do is build a company and then solve some tangible problem but but I think that the most interesting things operate on these phenomena in the world which are really just fundamental to how humans or the world operate so what you did was something that was fundamental for a small market and then you just expand them are from beyond Harvard students to everyone but Harvard students are sufficiently like that well it was gross yeah it was fundamental for me right it's like I like I felt this need really acutely I really wanted this right and so yeah and then I think it's just I mean that's one of the things that I think we were lucky about in kind of the expansion of the market was that it turned out that this wasn't something that was just for college students almost everyone in the world has friends and family and want to stay in touch with those people so it ended up being a pretty ubiquitous service in retrospect this is a bit of a controversial question perhaps but in retrospect do you think myspace had a chance since once you started and you got all the college students I mean the college students are arguably like the center of gravity socially right you own all the college students it feels like you know from the point you start expanding out of Harvard my Space Mountain might not have known it maybe you didn't even know it but it seems like in retrospect they were doomed you know I don't I don't see it that way actually I they could have won no it's not about winning and losing it's about doing something that's valuable right and there are more than one more than one social network not really many I mean my view of the world is that almost every product in category is going to get transformed and reimagined to be social so there were things that myspace did that Facebook has never done you know MySpace I think was it was a much better service early on for meeting new people read Facebook was never primarily about meeting new people it was about staying connected with with the people that you knew and and kind of mapping out the real relationships that existed now I think part of the issue is the sauce growing and they felt threatened by that and tried to copy what we were doing and that's like you're never going to win that way right it is I mean I think of all these interesting social services and apps that are getting built today I mean think about all the new apps that you guys install on your phones there are so many interesting things and there are eight out of the top ten iOS apps plug into Facebook 50 percent of the top 400 apps plug into Facebook they're all kind of socially integrated and in these ways but companies that are getting started now that are just trying to copy the stuff that that the other companies are doing just aren't aren't successful by the way how we doing is there anybody in charge of time 12:27 what time do we start few more minutes all right if you will ask you a few more questions um so you think do you think myspace could have survived if they had gone off into some marginal territory like country marginally your somehow I think that there is a real value in the world people have a fundamental need I think to stay connected with the people they know and I think people have many fundamental needs to meet new people and expand their horizons as well and that's never been the primary problem that Facebook is trying to solve and and I think it's something that we can do it's something that someone else could do using our platform or that someone else could do using building it independently and um you know I never bought the music thing for MySpace so I mean they they they kind of always say that there were music service I'm not sure why did they do that I don't know if you have to ask them but hmm maybe they can't they counted on bands to spam their fans or something like that that's a that's a powerful force in the world so before we go I want to ask you about how you ended up out here do you what was always the sort of how did how did you end up in that house in Palo Alto was it something you decided at the last minute I don't actually remember you know I remember bits of the story but you know so I first I wrote the first version of Facebook January of 2004 right and released it in February and um the reason why I did in January was was because at the time Harvard had this intersession thing it's kind of weird and I think that they don't have a link period anymore I think they've changed it so now there's no now I started yeah well you know now I'm bad because they try to kick out everyone who starts anything interesting there but um but that's huh huh that's um but um I think that I think that they're actually trying to change that but um but it is striking the so now they've made it I think so finals or before you go away for holidays but they have this thing before where in January you basically just have this dead month where you could study for finals oh my gosh where you could study for finals ethically coming - you could study for finals I wondered when I saw it was started in January it was started in reading period yeah and it was because you had this time whether you weren't too busy with stuff yeah although I actually um I probably should have been studying there's this other story that I think is very funny which is um I was taking this course Rome of Augustus and it was it was one of the core curriculum classes that we had in the final was the these pieces of art that you study throughout the class and then they give you some on the final day they show you some of the pieces of art and you have to write about the historical significance of them and you know I hadn't really done much of the reading in the class I mostly just spent my time programming and building stuff that I enjoyed and you know I could have used reading period to to study for this but instead I spent it reading a building Facebook so instead what I did was I am I hacked together this website where I went and downloaded from from the course website the 200 or so images that were going to be potentially on the final and I just built this very simple page site where it showed one of the images and then you could contribute what you thought was significant about it and then you can see what other people thought was significant about it and then I am and then you could go next to note pulp a random one and and then I emailed it to the class list I was like hey guys I built a study tool anyone that find this interesting and and everyone just populated this thing for me and it was wonderful and that the professor after that they mentioned that the grades on the final had never been higher before so Sonia so yeah so you Krauts were studying so yeah so I'm pleased so and you know a lot of interesting social dynamics that you can apply to almost any category that you choose to build for but yeah so i built i built the first version in january some of the time I was at Harvard supposed to be studying I actually went and visited a couple of friends one who was at Stanford and one who is out at Cal Tech and and at the time I'd never really been out to California before and you went in January in January and what did you think well I was really nice I remember you know coming in to the like affluent SFO and was driving down 101 and I saw these buildings for all these companies like wow this is like where these technologies company these technology companies come from this is amazing and and you know and then I just looking at the weather also is awesome and I remember I had been at Harvard for a freshman year and I stayed there for the summer and then sophomore year so by the time that sophomore summer kind of came around my friends and I were just like okay well let's let's go somewhere else right and let's rent a place in California so we just had to get a place in in Palo Alto and the idea at the time wasn't that we actually were not thinking about moving to California or dropping out the actually the actual thought that had crossed that was in our mind was it'll be neat to be around some of these other great companies that are getting built one day maybe we'll find something that will build a company out of but surely this isn't it and so we went out to California and and we just I remember this conversation where one day Dustin pulled me aside and was like you know we were getting to have a lot of users and where we are having an increasing number of servers we have no ops guy all right so we're the ops guy and and this was before kind of ec2 right so you didn't have to so you have to do more to manage manage your own servers at that point and just like you know this is this is really hard I don't think that we can do this and take a full course load so let's so Harvard has this policy where you can take as much time as you want off from school so why don't we just take one term off and then just try to get it under and build the toolings that way we can go back for spring semester and run it more autonomously and and it'll grow and we'll be able to run a more autonomous lake so we did that and and of course we raise money from Peter teal but we told him the plan right and and kind of explained what he told him you might go back to school yeah and I think he didn't believe us but you know smart new wet work my life is just this long history of people thinking I was going to drop out well before I did but um but so then you know spring term came along and we hadn't quite built the tooling and automation so you know let's take another term off and then finally at some point we we just figured that we were that we were out there but by then I mean we had no millions of users so you didn't definitely decide not to go back to hello until you had millions of users oh yeah yeah Wow hey I think I could still go back Harvard Harvard is this policy where you can go back for as long as you want whatever their policy was I'm sure they would bend the rules in your case all right are we are we done are we over is there anybody watching the time well we can go I have to go to mark has a wedding he has did I do it's actually the guy who I am who I said before I used to go out to pizza with him every almost every night we were doing our CS problem sets with he's he joined Facebook and we're really good friends and he's getting married right after this so I have to go and run off to that but thank you guys

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 547,610

Rating: 4.8272161 out of 5

Keywords: Y Combinator, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Startup School, 2012, YC

Id: 5bJi7k-y1Lo

Length: 32min 18sec (1938 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Sigelac]

Zuckerberg should stick to his skills of designing bad user interfaces and convincing everyone to use them and be his product.

I believe the "pute" part means "to reckon". Reckon can mean think in English, but in this case, reckon means "to add, sum, mathematically derive". Compute means "add together", and computer means "one who adds together". The first computers were people who worked in accounting, adding up accounts. The first mechanical computers were intended as a tool to make it easier to do lots of math. The idea of using them for communication and networking came later.

[u/Glorious_Comrade]

As far as fuckerberg is concerned, it's more like com + puta.