Mark Zuckerberg : How to Build the Future

welcome to how to build the future today our guest is Mark Zuckerberg mark you've built one of the most influential companies in the history of the world so we are especially excited that you are here I'm not sure where to go from there um well why don't we start with just the early days of Facebook tell us what it was like when you started it sure so for me the thing that I was really fascinated by and it always have been is people right and how people work in artists in college I studied psychology and computer science and you know one of the things that you learn when you study psychology is that there are all these parts of the brain which are geared just towards understanding people right understanding language how to communicate with each other understanding facial expressions emotions processing yet when I looked out at the internet right in 2004 which is when I was getting started you can find almost anything else that you wanted right you could find news movies music reference materials but the thing that mattered the most to people which was other people and like understanding what's going on with them it just wasn't there right and I think what was going on was that all that other content was just out there able to be indexed by you know search engines and and other services but in order to understand what's going on with people you needed to build tools that made it so that they could express what was going on with themselves you know I wanted to figure out what courses to take so I I built this little website coursematch that you know that just made it so you could enter what courses you were taking and you could click on them and see who else was in them and it did all these correlations who told you people who took this course we're likely to enjoy this course too and you know the thing that just struck me from the beginning is you know people would just spend hours clicking through the here are the courses that people are taking and Wow like isn't it interesting that this person is interested in these things and it was just text right there's nothing that was like super interesting there but that just struck me is you know people have this deep thirst to understand what's going on with with those around them and you know there were probably you know 10 other things like that then I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got around to building the first version of Facebook that kind of added a lot of these things together did you think Facebook was going to be a company when you started I built the first version of Facebook because it's something that my friends and I wanted to use at Harvard a directory and a way to connect with the other people around us and I didn't think at all that was going to be a company I remember very specifically the night that that we launched the first version I went out to to get pizza with a couple of my friends who now work here and you know and I remember really clearly we were talking about how one day we thought that someone was going to build a community like this for the world and that that would be some company but like it clearly wasn't gonna be us I mean it just it wasn't even I didn't even occur yeah no I mean it wasn't even an option that we considered that it might be us I mean we just weren't focused on building a company back then we were just building something that that that we thought would be useful at our school so as you look back is there something that made Facebook different from the other projects that you had built that allowed it to turn into this the companies today um well for one I think we we kept going right so I mean they the others I mean course match and you know just the the other different crowdsource tools you know they kind of served their purpose yeah and then we were done worse with Facebook there was just such you know people loved it right and had such an intensity of using I think within a couple of weeks two-thirds of students at Harvard were using it and all these other students said MIT and other local universities were writing in asking us if we could open up Facebook it at their school so we kind of just followed that right um you know again we didn't I didn't set out and you know my roommates didn't set out to to build a service that we're going to turn into a company but we just kind of followed what people wanted and that led us to expand it to all these other schools and and eventually beyond schools and to you know at some point once we'd hired a bunch of people we decided to turn it into a company and and go for this mission of connecting the world but that's not where we started is you think about where you did start is there other advice that comes to mind that you give to other people that want to build products uh that you can take away from the early days of Facebook yeah you know I always think that you should start with the problem that you're trying to solve in the world and not start with deciding that you want to build a company writing the best company is that that get built are things that are trying to drive some kind of social change even if it's just local in one place I you know more than starting out because you want to make a bunch of money or have a lot of people working for you or or build some company in some way so you know I always think that this is kind of a perverse thing about Silicon Valley in a way through which is that you know people decide often that they want to start a company before they even decide what they want to do and that just feels really backwards to me and you know for anyone who said the experience of actually building a company you know that you go through some really hard things along the way and I think part of what gets you through that is believing in what you're doing and knowing that what you're doing is is really delivering a lot of value for people and that's I think how the best companies end up getting made I want to talk for a second about low points because I think people never appreciate how bad they really are and I think it's always reassuring to hear that even Mark Zuckerberg went through some serious low points and came out okay so can you tell us about some of the hardest parts in the history of the early history of Facebook yeah I think one of the hardest parts for me was was actually when Yahoo offered to buy the company for for a lot of money because up until that point that was this turning point in the company where before that we every day we just come in and kind of do what we thought was the right next thing to do right we'd open two more schools we we open to high school and open beyond schools and you know launch more photos so because because that's what it seemed like the next thing that we needed to do to help people express themselves and understand more what was going on around them but then no yahoo came in with this with this really meaningful offer right even a billion dollars for into the company I was a couple of years Edeka right and you know we have 10 million people using the product at the time quite so it wasn't like it wasn't as if it were obvious that we were going to succeed far beyond that and that was the first point where we really had to to look at the future and say wow is what we're going to build I'm going to actually be so much more meaningful for this and you know that caused a lot of interesting conversations in the company and with our investors and you know at the end of that Dustin and I just decided you know we think that we can actually go connect more than just the 10 million people who are in schools we can go beyond that and have this really be a successful thing and we decide to go for it but it was really stressful because a lot of people really thought that we should sell the company and and you know for a lot of folks who joined a start-up I feel like at that point I hadn't been very good about communicating that we were trying to go for this mission yeah you know we just showed up every day and yeah and just kind of did what we thought was the the right next thing to do so for a lot of the folks who joined early on that there weren't really aligned with me right for them you know they joined and um you know being able to sell a company for a billion dollars after a couple years was I was like a home run right and it is a home run right then and that's you know I think that that's um I get that but you know that I think that the fact that I didn't communicate very well about what we were trying to do cause caused this huge tension and the part that was painful wasn't wasn't turning down the offer it was the fact that after that a huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in and what we were what we were doing right I mean if you look at the management team that we had did that fellow management team leave the whole management team was gone within within about a year after that did you ever regret that decision in that period like where there are times where you were like well we should have sold um you know we were I was I got really lucky because you know not only did did what I believed in end up working out but it ended up working out pretty quickly right so it literally you know I think this was in the summer of 2006 and by I think the next month after that we launched news feed or which now ten years later looking back at it is you know one of the most used products in the world and then we launched the ability for anyone to sign up which immediately started growing the community so within a few months after turning down the offer I think it was actually pretty clear that that was the right decision but you know I think you know since then there have been much harder decisions that we've had to make where you know sometimes you have to you have to bet on something and and you know either you know bet the direction of the company or you know bet billions of dollars on something it's not going to be clear with your right for five or ten years and you know that I think actually can end up being much harder than this what I want to talk about next but before we go there have you ever thought about selling the company again since no after that poor name is just yeah got that out of the way we're gonna be here for a long time and yeah cool um yes so I want to talk about one of the most common questions we get from people building products is how to decide what to build how to figure out when to bet the company how to do something totally new yeah and I think one thing that Facebook is done incredibly well is figure out what to build and beep and build this repeated innovation culture which i think is like the hardest thing to do in business so how have you done that and how do you advise other people to do the same I think the key is building a company which is focused on learning as quickly as possible right companies are learning organisms and you can make decisions that either make it's that you learned faster or you learn slower and you know in a lot of ways building a company is like following the scientific method right you try a bunch of different hypotheses and if you set up the experiments well then you kind of learn what to do and that's that's an important philosophy so there are all these different decisions that we make inside the company you know everything down to really empowering individual engineers we invest in this huge testing framework right at any given point in time there aren't there's not just one version of Facebook running in the world right there's probably tens of thousands of versions running because engineers here have the power to to try out idea and and ship it to you know maybe 10,000 people or a hundred thousand people and then they get a readout on how that version of what they did whether it was a change to show better content a newsfeed or UI change or some new feature they could have read out on how that version performed compared to the baseline version of Facebook that we have on everything that we care about how how connected people are you know how much people are sharing and how much they say that they're finding meaningful content business metrics like how much revenue we make and engagement of the overall community and you know by running in tens of thousands of different experiments inputting the power in people's hands to try all these different things you can imagine we just make so much more progress that we could if every change had to be approved by me right already every idea had to come from for management so I do think there's something very deep about building this you know learning culture and moving quickly towards that that just helps you get ahead over time what about the the bigger bets like making a large acquisition or the rollout of a news feed or something like that how do you edit those decisions work so I actually think when you do stuff well you don't you you shouldn't have to do big crazy things right so you want to actually evolve in a way where you're working with your community and making steps and learning so take newsfeed for example that there was a relatively big shift but it actually had been a couple of years in the making by watching what how people were using the service right so know it when we started off we didn't have anything like news feed that showed you updates from from what people were sharing we just had profiles and what we found were originally one of the big behaviors was people just click around right - they'd click on different profiles you know hundreds of them just - and they'd go through all their friends to see what people had changed right to see what the update was and and in in their friends day and we learned from that that people were not just interested in looking up and learning about a person but also understanding the day-to-day changes so you know first we made this product that I just showed in order which of your friends had updated their profile right so that at least told you whose profile to click on and then you know the first version reduced food was really simple all it did was it basically took the content that people were posting and put it in order on on your homepage so I think when you're when when things are working well you use data and you use the qualitative feedback that you're getting from from listening to how your community is using your product to tell you what problems to go solve and then you basically use intuition to figure out what the solutions to those problems might be and then you test those hypotheses by rolling them out and getting more data and feedback on that and then that gives you a sense of where to go um you know when I look at things like you know we bought you know the oculus team for a lot of money right I actually view that as you know if we'd done a better job of building up some of the expertise to do some of that stuff internally then you know maybe we wouldn't have had to do that but you know instead we hadn't done that and you know the oculus team is by far the most talented team working on that problem so it just made sense to go make this big move but I actually kind of think as as CEO it's your job to not get into a position where you need to be doing these crazy things righted yes of course it's inevitable you know over the period of doing stuff you'll you know you can't be ahead of everything so it's better to to make big moves and be willing to do that then you know have pride and and not do that and never admit that you that you could have done something better in the past but but then when stuff is working well you're learning incrementally and and growing that way speaking of growing one thing I heard you say years ago is that one of the best things Facebook had done was invent the idea of a growth group oh and so this is something now that I've heard a lot of founders ask about could you tell us is that still something you recommend people running companies put in place and how Facebook's worked in the early days so making it so we could grow faster was I think the most important product feature that we ended up building for Facebook and you know the traditional approach to growing and marketing is you know you have a communications group or you have a marketing team and you buy ads and yeah you know I think there's some sometimes there's a place for it for that especially when you're trying to communicate something and get a message out but if you're actually trying to to grow a product I think the often the best levers for doing that are within the product themselves and getting people in your community who enjoy what you're doing to evangelize that to their friends and getting that to happen efficiently as if as possible so there's no magic in the growth group that we that we built that other people can't replicate you know it's it's just being very rigorous with data investing in data infrastructure so that way you can process all these different experiments and learn what people are trying to tell you and and then go invest engineering and actually trying to grow the community cuz I think that's the most important feature for a lot of networks and can you tell how much of an impact that group had on the growth rate of Facebook um yeah I think it's you know their overall I think it's been very big I don't have a number off the top my head but I've been even just looking at your just some of these specific features that we've built like people you may know right which is yeah you know one of the important things right again if you're you know social product isn't that useful if you're not connected to other people you want in your using it so you know helping you go from signing up for Facebook to connecting to the people that you care about most is probably one of the most important things that we can do another thing that I think Facebook is done exceptionally well is hiring and and I always tell founders that this is the thing you have to get good at so how have you hired your team and what do you look for when you bring people on if you think about it you know I started the company one has 19 right so I can't institutionally believe that experience is that important right or else I would have a hard time reconciling to myself right and and and the company so you know we invest in in people who we think are just really talented even if they haven't done that thing before and you know that applies to people who are fresh out of university as well as you know people like you know the CFO who took the company public and not taking a company public before right and hit a lot of his background was in you know production development to Genentech before so you know just focus on really talented people and so if you don't have the experience to look for how do you assess someone's raw talent um well often you can tell from different things that they've done right so it's it's not that you know obviously everyone's done something right if even if you're 19 right you've um you've done side projects and interesting stuff and you know I think what's important is not to believe that someone has to have specifically done the job that they're going to do in order to be able to to do it well one of the things that I think we've done well is is just given the people at the company a lot of opportunity right so you know it's not just me who started when I was 19 and and now you know I'm running this big company there were a number of people who joined who were you know people I did problem sets with at Harvard or they dropped out of Stanford or you know different programs who have grown with the company over this long period of time and you know one of the things that I'm the most proud of is we have about 12 different product groups of the company and all of the people who are running them with the exception of one I did not join the company running a product group or reporting to me that's amazing um and the one exception was is David Marcus who was the CEO of a fifty billion dollar public company so you know some pretty happy that that he's on board and having him run a product group I think is a pretty big coup too but literally none of them started off reporting to me you know they all start off in different different roles some where engineers some where data analysts some where product managers and they've all grown but I think what happens is you know people see that you create opportunities for people and and that also I think keeps the best people engaged and makes the best people want to come work at your company because they feel like oh I'm going to get those kind of opportunities - cool yeah what are you most excited about over the next 20 years what do you think will be the major transformations how will Facebook transform how do you think the rest of the world to transform so we have this ten-year roadmap I was great you know three of the the big changes that we want to see in the world and we're focused on three things connectivity rights are getting everyone in the world on the Internet right now more than you know more than half the world is not on the Internet which is you know I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley quite take this for granted right the internet because it you know it's it just is not uniformly available and if we want to solve a lot of the the big challenges of the world today they're not problems that any one group of people or even one country can solve right they they really involve coming together and giving everyone an opportunity to participate and solving them so I think connecting everyone is is really a key which is going to be be great for for people around the world the next one is AI I think that that's just gonna unlock so much potential in so many different domains and we use it at Facebook for a lot of different things for showing people content that they're going to find more meaningful for making sure that you connect with the people you actually care about on the service but in a lot of ways the work that we're doing on AI to push the fundamental you know state of the art forward is exactly the same stuff that's going into systems that diagnose diseases better right or find better drugs to treat people or that you know other companies are using when they build self-driving cars and you know these are things they're going to save lives right I mean if you can I heard this story recently that at this conference where someone has built a machine learning application where you can take a picture of a lesion on someone's skin and it can detect instantly whether it's skin cancer with the accuracy of the best dermatologists and doctors in the world so you know I mean who doesn't want that right now like you're gonna build to put the power in your doctors hand to become the best doctor of the world at that thing everyone will be the best doctor in the world and that's a really fundamental thing right that you know I I get a little bit frustrated I think when people you know fearmonger about about AI and how it could end up hurting people because I think in many real ways around diseases or not driving more safely this is going to save people's lives and push and push people for it so that that's a really big deal I think for the next ten years and then you know the next thing that I always think is is going to make a big difference is um you know over 10 or 15 years there's a new major computing platform that comes around that allows people to do completely different things than they could do before right so you know 20 years ago you know most of us were using desktop computers they were kind of clunky you know we use them and work because commit our work more productive but most people didn't use them for fun now we have phones which you know help us connect with each other and they're much more human devices but there's going to be another platform after that and I think that's going to be virtual reality and augmented reality and that I think is just going to help people you know be more creative experience what other people are feeling much more immersively than we even can through through video and things like that today so I'm really excited about that trend as well so you were nineteen when you started Facebook one question we hear a lot that Y Combinator is I'm 19 today I really want to you know do whatever I can to make the world better what should I do so how do you advise people who are 90 today and want to impact the world like you have you know I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about work on it but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working and I think that if you look at the data of like the very best companies that have gotten built I actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time a local maximum I totally agree and just to make this point how far into Facebook did it actually become a company um I don't know I think probably I think it became a a formal Delaware company when Peter Thiel invested about six months in when we were first talking to Peter about raising money Dustin and I were very clear with him that we were planning on going back to school ready Nara you know I started Facebook own as a sophomore we took the summer offered no classes over the summer we were working on it and then you know our stated game plan was to go back to school in the fall and continue working on it then but not like sit sit in an office and work on it full-time and Peter was just kind of like alright sure you are I guess he knew better than we think he just believed that you weren't actually gonna go back to high you must have I mean you'd have to ask him but I will were interviewing him in this series I was very good so I I think he would probably say that he knew that we were not going to go back to school or believed that he could talk us out of it but he didn't have to it was it was pretty clear that the amount of work was just growing so quickly but we actually did drop out immediately we told Harvard that we were taking one semester off and and then we told her that we take another semester off and then a year off and then after that we kind of we were going back uh speaking of Peter and a sort of a closing question what's the best piece of advice he ever gave you I think Peter was the person who who told me this really pithy quote that in a world that's changing so quickly the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk and I really think that that's true right a lot of people I think think that you know whenever it comes to whatever you get yourself into a position where you have to make some some big shift in direction or do something you know they're always people are going to point to the downside risks of that decision and locally there may be right right I mean if for any given decision that you're going to make there's upside and downside but in aggregate if you are stagnant and you don't make those changes then then I think you're guaranteed to fail right and not not catch up so to some degree I think it's really right that over time the biggest risk that you can take is to not take any risks that is a great place to leave it thank you very much all right

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 1,397,058

Rating: 4.7647529 out of 5

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator, facebook

Id: Lb4IcGF5iTQ

Length: 25min 26sec (1526 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

When it will rise is the real question lol

[u/[deleted]]

Umm...what about the actual REAL WORLD use of the product?

THATS what going to make it rise.