World Changers

If there is a single entrepreneur today who is inspiring millions of young people to consider following their own entrepreneurial dreams, it has got to be Mark Zuckerberg. The dropout who famously founded the social networking site Facebook already has been the subject of a blockbuster Hollywood movie, a 60 Minutes profile, an Oprah Winfrey TV show, and Time’s Man of the Year.

Though Facebook was only launched by Zuckerberg and his friends in February 2004, the site now has more than 750 million active users who spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the Web site. During the summer of 2011, when rumors began spreading that Facebook was planning a public offering, some observers believed the company could be valued at anywhere between $40 billion and $100 billion.

Yet Zuckerberg never really thought about creating a business when he and cofounders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin launched Facebook from his Harvard University dorm room. In fact, Zuckerberg claims that was the last thing on his mind. Instead, he and his pals had been deeply immersed in conversations about what kind of control people might have over the increasing volume of information in the world made accessible by the Internet.

Those animated discussions led Zuckerberg, then just nineteen years old, to build an application to allow Harvard’s six thousand students to stay connected with their friends and family. Amazingly, it took him just “a couple of weeks” to knock out the code to do it.

“I actually explicitly did not want to build a company,” he says. “And that is why, early on, when most people would probably launch it at schools that they thought would have the highest chance of working, I launched it at the schools that I thought it would have the lowest chance of working. So those were schools that already have some kind of school community. And the reason why I did that was because I wanted to know, early on, if this was something that was just worth spending a lot of time on as a project.”

Clearly, it was. So in March 2004, only a month after the app hit Harvard, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. Zuckerberg and his friends moved to Palo Alto, California, in June, expecting to stay through the summer and then return to Harvard. But the excitement of building the company in Silicon Valley took hold and they stayed. By the end of that first year, Facebook had nearly one million active users. After getting $12.7 million in funding from Accel Partners in May of 2005, Facebook expanded to more than eight hundred colleges.

Zuckerberg was able to make progress so quickly because he was a crack programmer himself. He began using computers and writing software in middle school. His father, Edward, a dentist, taught him Atari BASIC programming in the 1990s, and also hired a software developer to privately tutor Zuckerberg. The kid took to it easily, becoming something of a prodigy, developing communications tools, games, and even a music player. Zuckerberg’s Synapse Media Player used artificial intelligence to learn a user’s listening habits and earned the attention of both Microsoft and AOL, which tried to buy it and recruit Zuckerberg straight out of Phillips Exeter Academy. Instead, he chose to go to Harvard.

It was a smart move. In his sophomore year, Zuckerberg wrote the code for a software program called CourseMatch that allowed students to select classes based on the choices of other students. It also helped students form study groups. Then he created a program he first called Facemash, in which students could vote on the best-looking or “hotter” person from a selection of photographs. The site went up over a weekend, but became so popular it overwhelmed Harvard’s server and the school shut it down. From there came Facebook. And the rest, as they say, is history—though history in the making.

From those conversions that I had with my friends in college, we had this very broad idea of where we thought the world should go and kind of guide Facebook’s development to this date. But a lot of it was also just good technical decisions, getting really smart people in to work on it. Some of the smartest people that I’ve known were a lot of the original people involved in Facebook, and a lot of them are still here. I mean, people who were my teachers in school, people who were my classmates.

It occurred to me that building a company was the best way to align a group of people toward building something great. If they’re building something that’s good, you can work with partners and reward them if the product that you’re developing works well. I built the first version of Facebook in a couple of weeks. It was pretty quick, especially for the scale that it eventually was offering. I rented a server for $85 a month. And on that, we were basically doing millions of page views a day. Because at some point like 10 or 20 percent of all Harvard students were logged in at the same time. This was just in the first week.

I just got more and more smart people around me to join. Eventually we moved out to California. Originally when we went out, we weren’t expecting to move out there. We wanted to go for the summer because we had this feeling like, “Okay, all these great companies come from Silicon Valley. Wouldn’t it be cool to spend the summer out there and get that experience.”

But we expected to go back to Harvard in the fall. But Harvard has this great policy that lets you take as much time off as you want. So we decided, “Okay let’s go ahead and take one semester off and continue just building things out.” And more people joined our team, and at that point, we formally incorporated the company and got our investment from our first investor, Peter Thiel. And then things were just growing and we got up to a million users on our first year of running the site.

And then we decided, “Okay, let’s take a second term off from Harvard.” And then, you know, just things kept on growing and we got up to about 5 million users and we were like, “Okay, let’s take a whole year off.” And then like, “All right, I guess we’re not really going back.” But I mean it was never this big decision where it’s like, “Okay, at this point, I am going to drop out of school and start a company.” It just happened very gradually and at each step, we were just doing what made sense to do next.

One of the great things about the Internet is these markets are very efficient. With more traditional businesses, it would take often years of investment before you hit some kind of curve where you knew whether your thing was going to work. Now it’s possible to build something in a weekend or, you know, two weeks as the first version of Facebook took. And just launch something and see if it addresses the market or [is something] that anyone will really use. From there you can get real-time feedback and adjust what you’re doing very quickly.

I looked around at Valley companies. I really wanted to build a technology company. Some call themselves technical companies. But they’re not. We were always really committed to just kind of maintaining technical folks and entrepreneurs running the company. Even in nontechnical roles, one of our marketing roles is someone who has a technical background.

As we’ve grown it’s become more apparent to us how we’re different from other companies. Google is a technology I admire. They have a really strong academic culture. They do a lot of research and have a lot of PhDs. What we pride ourselves on is having a lot of impact, having a strong hacker culture, giving people a chance to grow—those are things that we work on. We have more than 300 million users and less than three hundred engineers. The ratio of users to engineers is far more than any other company.

One of the things we’re committed to is having a smaller team. We have frequent pushes for code. We encourage people to build a lot of their own stuff. We have a technology company that’s really a hacker company.

Our goal isn’t necessarily to keep people forever. There are companies that train people really well. A lot of Harvard people went on to McKinsey. A lot of people went to IBM because that was the best place to learn sales. A lot of people go to USC to learn how to play football. One of the things at Facebook is [to] have a place where it’s one of the best places to learn how to build stuff. If you want to learn how to build really good products and practices and have a large impact, I would argue there’s no better place to do that than at Facebook.

If people want to come here for one, two, or three years. Steve Chen, who founded YouTube, was working on Facebook before. I’m not encouraging people [who] work at Facebook to leave. But I think you learn valuable skills. We’re not pretending we’re building a company that hackers are going to want to work at forever. I want to be a part of building some institutions to be a great hacker institution in the long term.

You need to focus on a few things you care about. Moving fast. You need to give up some things you need to do that. I think that is a really big part of a CEO’s job. You hire the team that’s going to go build everything. You set up the direction. What really comes off is what trade-offs you’re going to make.

We think eventually you get judged not by how you look but by what you build. I think there’s a lot of pressures inside of companies where people want to optimize for a launch to go smoothly. But really you want to be the best over time. Take more risks. If we do those, we have a good shot at succeeding.

The biggest risk you can take is to take no risk. In a world that’s moving quickly, you know that if you don’t change you’ll lose. Not taking risk is the riskiest thing you can do. You have to do things that are kind of bold even if they’re not obvious.

We made this change yesterday that lets you see the most recent stuff or the most interesting updates. Regardless of what we do, if it changes the site, change is really disruptive for people. Especially if you’re providing a Web service that people aren’t opting into directly.

Values are worthless unless they’re controversial. We want to move quickly. We’re willing to give up a huge amount of stuff in order to move quickly.

I think it was really valuable because I was nineteen when I started this. There was just so much that I didn’t know. There still is, and Silicon Valley is just a great place to meet a lot of great engineers. There’s a lot of infrastructure built up to help get companies off the ground. Whether it’s the investment community or the legal community, or just all these different areas. Undoubtedly that helped us. Although I think it can work both ways.

It’s just my view of thinking through the technology industry and its history. I think the companies that have done the best have often been led by their founders. And I think that’s because those people have the better sense of why the company was created and have a lot of credibility within the company to make the decisions that need to be made. The world changes so quickly, so being able to guide the company efficiently, I think, is an extremely important part of that. Someone showed me an interesting stat once that out of public companies, the ones that were still run by their founders outperformed others.

We have a strong sense of purpose as a company. You know we didn’t start Facebook to build a Web site or even start Facebook to build a company. We started this because we wanted to make the world more open and connected. Building a site is the first step toward that. I think that the platform that we’re developing is what I’m most excited about. We have almost a million developers right now building things, ranging from groups of people building things in college, getting started like I did, to small and large businesses that have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. They’ve primarily built on top of the Facebook platform. That’s really exciting.

There are so many things that I would have done differently. I mean, in general, it’s just that you make a lot of mistakes and those are valuable mistakes. We’re better off for having made most of those, but I also think that we’ve done a good job of staying true to who the company is and what we started off to do. And we’ve also made a lot of very good technical and product decisions along the way and good cultural decisions to make sure that we can make it so the best people can come and work here. And have a very big impact very quickly. I think that those are the most important things. And if you get those right then you can actually make a lot of mistakes.

Actually one of the core values of Facebook is “Move fast.” And we used to write this down by saying, “Move fast and break things.” And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough. I think that’s still basically true. I mean, right now, we’ve optimized so much of our culture around just making it so that people can come and build things quickly.

Whether it’s everything from having the right tools in the right development environment to build things quickly, to nightly code pushes, hiring the best people who have a bias toward just pushing things very quickly—the whole culture is tuned around that. And I think there’s probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn, which is that making mistakes is okay.

At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something, not to not make mistakes. In order to get any reasonable conclusion, you’re going to make missteps along the way. And as long as you learn from them and those become valuable in getting to where you want to go, then I think that’s fine.