A lot of companies can go off course because of corporate pressures… I don’t know what we are going to be building five years from now. I don’t know what we are going to be building three years from now.
A number of firms approached us, but DST stood out because of the global perspective they bring – backed up by the impressive growth and financial achievements of their internet investments. We’re looking forward to working with the DST team.
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
Advertising on the Web is less about just hitting someone with a message… It’s about engagement [with that user].
Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.
All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school – my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.
At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.
Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
Both U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Nicholas Sarkozy have used Facebook as a way to organize their supporters. From the protests against the Colombian FARC, a 40-year old terrorist organization, to fighting oppressive, fringe groups in India, people use Facebook as a platform to build connections and organize action.
By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.
Creating channels between people who want to work together toward change has always been one of the ways that social movements push the world forward and make it better.
Every application will be designed from the ground up to use real identity and friends.
Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn’t really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn’t until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.
Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories… We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that’s out there.
Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn’t do with anything else, we just have to do it.
Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.
For the first time we’re allowing developers who don’t work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That’s a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.
Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.
Growth is a strategic thing for us.
I actually do think you’re seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that’s a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what’s going on with them.
I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.
I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.
I find the mounting pressure on us to remove Holocaust-denying groups incredibly frustrating. I feel no shame at all working at a company that holds free…
I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.
I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we’ve funded ever since by putting ads on the side.
I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.
I mean, we’ve built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it’s really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that’s what’s so amazing about the scale that it’s at today.
I started Facebook when I was 19; I was just a kid. I knew nothing about business and nothing had ever been written about me. So, a lot of these experiences along the way were really new and took some getting-used to.
I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.
I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.
I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that’s true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.
I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.
If these new documents are approved, all future changes to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will go through the same process of notice and comment, and may be put to a vote if enough people comment … Even if these new proposed documents are defeated, we will still find ways to involve you in the governance process; however, this involvement will need to be explicitly stated in a future version of the Terms of Use.
If you don’t need that capital, then all the pressures are different, and the motivations are not there in the same way.
I’m not looking to take this money and go do a bunch of things with it immediately. We will continue looking at talent acquisition just as we had over the last period of time and if any make a lot of sense, then we’ll surely go ahead and do…
In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.
In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want … The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work.
In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.
It might come in handy if we want to expand.
It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.
Look at the way celebrities and politicians are using Facebook already. When Ashton Kutcher posts a video, he gets hundreds of pieces of feedback. Maybe he doesn’t have time to read them all or respond to them all, but he’s getting good feedback and getting a good sense of how people are thinking about that and maybe can respond to some of it.
Mobile is a lot closer to TV than it is to desktop.
More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world.
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
Move fast. Take risks. It’s ok to try big things. You’re better off trying something and having it not work and then learning from that than having not done anything at all.
My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.
My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.
No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.
On engagement, we’re already seeing that mobile users are more likely to be daily active users than desktop users. They’re more likely to use Facebook six or seven days of the week.
Our goal is not to build a platform; it’s to be across all of them.
Our revenue numbers are up and our growth continues to scale very rapidly. This investment is purely buffer for us, and not something we need to get cashflow positive.
People are learning how to use the site and what’s ok to share. As time goes on, people will learn what’s appropriate, what’s safe for them – and learn to share accordingly.
People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.
People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don’t really believe in it, then they are not going to really work hard.
People don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie – or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people’s life better, then that’s something that’s really good.
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
People want to go online and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? Friends, pictures, profiles, whatever you can visit, browse around, maybe it’s someone you just met at a party.
Phones are inherently social devices and the industry is just beginning to discover what’s possible.
Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
Serving more people, increasing your customer base and making them more deeply engaged is by itself good business.
So obviously, a big part of our mission is just connecting all these different people in the world. And one of the things that we are really proud of is that now 800 million people around the world are using Facebook every month and perhaps even crazier. It’s mind-blowing from my perspective. But more than half a billion people use Facebook every day. And I just think that’s crazy.
Thanks to all of these efforts, our business is doing really well, and we’re on track to create a nice self-sustaining business, and because of this, a lot of companies and firms have approached us about investing in the company
The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.
The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.
The company is definitely set up in a way where myself and the other founders have a lot of control over it.
The only meat I eat is from animals I’ve killed myself.
The past week reminded us that users feel a real sense of ownership over Facebook itself, not just the information they share.
The question isn’t, ‘What do we want to know about people?’, It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?’
The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it’s actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions… If people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.
The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.
The web is at a really important turning point right now. Up until recently, the default on the web has been that most things aren’t social and most things don’t use your real identity. We’re building toward a web where the default is social.
There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking.
There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
There’s lots of stuff none of us have ever seen before. That’s good in some ways, but limiting in other ways.
There’s two things you can do, and I don’t think either one will happen to help Indiana out of this situation. First is get medical insurance for everyone. Second is banks and lenders just need to be more responsible about who they give credit cards to.
Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.
This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.
This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook’s a free service. It’s free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.
Through an application developed by Wildfire Promotion Builder, you can now vote on which documents you want to serve as the foundation for governing the Facebook site … You will have two options on the ballot: 1) the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR), which incorporate feedback from users and experts received during the 30-day comment period, or 2) the current Terms of Use, which were developed by Facebook and did not go through an outside comment period.
We are definitely in no rush.
We are working hard to build a service that everyone, everywhere can use. Whether they are a person, a company, a president or an organisation working for change.
We are young, so I have to be thinking about the longterm, you know, and how the stuff is going to play out. And I think that the way that you achieve the best longterm value is by building real value in the world. Are we actually helping them achieve their goal of understanding the world? And if we can do that, I don’t think we’re gonna gave a hard time making money.
We encourage you to participate and make your voice heard … For this vote and any future one, the results will be binding if at least 30% of active Facebook users at the time that the vote was announced participate.
We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that’s something we’re proud of.
We’re running the company to serve more people.
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they’re proud of.
When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.
When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.
With a community that large and engaged, it needs a more open process of governance…
You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.
You know what we are trying to do at Facebook is just help people connect and comunicate more efficiently.
