Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Facebook Secrets
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, was interviewed at Y Combinator's Startup School by Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston.
The interview covered many aspects of the second youngest billionaire's development of Facebook and what it's like being an entrepreneur. However, many noted what Zuckerberg said toward the end of his interview as the most fascinating.
Livingston asked him: "What would you do different if you could go back in time?"
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Zuckerberg replied, "If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.”
“There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term. You don’t have to move out here to do this," he said after describing a conversation he had with Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.
Zuckerberg talked about the first ideas he had about Facebook, and admits to being "in denial" on making it a company. He said, "We were just building this because we thought it was awesome."
He said he and his team had first pitched the idea to Battery Ventures in Boston in 2004, but said he barely remembered anything about it except that it happened and that his partner at the time, Eduardo Saverin, took care of most of the financial and business back then.
The Facebook mastermind continued to tell his amazing story filling in details as Livingston asked questions. Several times during the interview he stated having passion and looking to complete the vision were among the most important parts of having a successful business.
Livingston asked Zuckerberg what surprised him most about Facebook to which the creator responded, “Most things were surprising...I don’t pretend that I had any idea what I was doing. I always felt like we were so close to dying in the first years, and were afraid that Google was about to build our product and we were going to be screwed, and look how long it took for them to build our product,” he said. “You are going to make a ton of mistakes, you don’t get judged by that.”
On the future of Facebook, Zuckerberg said, “I think the story that we look back will be the apps and things that are built on top of Facebook. The past five years have been about being connecting people and the next five to ten years are about what are all the things that can be built now that these connections are in place.”
