Facebook AMA
Zuckerberg holds an “Ask Me Anything” session where he answers questions from celebrities such as Shakira and Richard Branson, as well as ordinary Facebook users. Questions include: how Facebook will connect the world better; how he sees technology helping the disadvantaged; how many hours he works a week, and requests to see pictures of his dog, Beast.
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102028100357421
Zuckerberg interview
Arrington interviews Zuckerberg at TechCrunch 40:
If you take all the people in the world and all their friends, that’s the social graph…What we try to do at Facebook is model that
Arrington:
You’re trying to mirror the real world?
Zuckerberg:
Exactly.
Zuckerberg Startup School interview
Zuckerberg discusses writing the first code for Facebook, and says his experience writing games and a music player for himself while young helped.
If you want to be able to connect with the people around you you have to start building software that other people want to use as well.
At Harvard, he wrote a scraper to extract information from the course cataloge and ran the site from a laptop in the dorm room. He says he met Chan at a going away party after Harvard threatened to kick him out. People involved in Facebook focused on developing it for fellow students, and talked about how someone else like Microsoft would likely build the service for everyone to use:
We thought, we’re just college students, what do we know about building software that hundreds of millions of people are going to use?
Y Combinator Startup School interview
Zuckerberg takes stage at Y Combinator Startup School.
I’m not good at pitching anything. I never really pitched. There’s Eduardo who did some. Moved out here Peter Thiel was our first investor. Sean Parker helped set us up with first outsourced accounting firm, introduced us to Peter. There were already hundreds of thousands of users. It was clear that if we executed we would continue to do well. I was 19, I doubt I was at all impressive. For the first two years the only advice he would give me was “don’t mess it up”. Gets back to the “build something people want” motto. Early on we were clueless, all of us came from having users and growing at a sustainable rate. When we were first meeting with Peter, we didn’t have Facebook.com. We were The Facebook. That’s a winner.
Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012
Graham interviews Zuckerberg about the flexibility that being in college allows, and he says that remaining flexible can help a career:
You’re going to change what you do.
Zuckerberg interview
Arrington talks with Zuckerberg at Disrupt 2012 in his first interview after the Facebook IPO announcement. They discuss the stock price, ads, Facebook phone, and the mobile version vs the website. Arrington:
The stock has lost roughly half its value…if you could’ve done anything differently with hindsight?
Zuckerberg:
The performance of the stock has obviously been disappointing…We’re going to execute this mission where we’re going to make the world more open and connected
Zuckerberg interview
Wall Street’s D8 interviews Zuckerberg about Facebook privacy. Zuckerberg says this on Facebook violating people privacy:
If I knew what I know now then I hope I wouldn’ve made those mistakes, but I can’t go back and change the past, I can only do what we think is the right thing going forward.
Palo Alto interview
Zuckerberg is interviewed at the Facebook offices in Palo Alto.
The goal that we went into it with wasn’t to make an online community, but to make a mirror of the real community that existed in real life. So The Facebook for your school isn’t somewhere where people actually go to meet, but where you go to see who knows each other. Like an icebreaker. You can find out something about people, and see who you want to meet, and maybe you can message them and make a really informal way to start a dialogue.
On future growth:
There really doesn’t have to be much more. Like a lot of people are focussed on taking over the world, or doing the biggest thing, or getting the most users. Part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely.
