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.
Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
The only meat I eat is from animals I've killed myself.
You get a reputation for stability if you are stable for years.
The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.
People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.
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.
Our strategy is very horizontal. We're trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically, we're trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social, whether it's on the web or mobile or other devices. So inherently, our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one.
If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.
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.
Our goal is to make it so there's as little friction as possible to having a social experience.
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.
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.
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.
By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent.
We have these services that people love and that are drivers of data usage... and we want to work this out, so that way, it's a profitable model for our partners.
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.
We pay attention to every demographic in every country, so we're going to focus on building things that teens are going to like, and we're also going to focus on building things that other folks are going to like.
One of my big regrets is that Facebook hasn't had a major chance to shape the mobile operating system ecosystem.
The majority of people who don't have Internet, don't have the Internet because they don't know why they want to use the Internet.
It's against all of our policies for an application to ever share information with advertisers.
People love photos. Photos originally weren't that big a part of the idea for Facebook, but we just found that people really like them, so we built out this functionality.
I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we'd initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally.
The main Facebook usage is so big. About 20 percent of the time people spend on their phone is on Facebook.
I just want to make sure when I have kids, I can spend time with them. That's the whole point.
We just think that there are all these different ways that people want to share, and that compressing them all into a single blue app is not the right format of the future.
What really motivates people at Facebook is building stuff that they're proud of.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What really motivates people at Facebook is building something that's worthwhile, that they're going to be proud to show to friends and family.
The connectivity declaration is about uniting the whole industry - a lot of companies that typically compete very fiercely - to push in a coherent direction.
There are definitely elements of experience and stuff that someone who's my age wouldn't have. But there are also things that I can do that other people wouldn't necessarily be able to.
My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person.
A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it's the most ridiculous concept.
The thing that's been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is - I think then, and I think now - that if we didn't do this, someone else would have done it.
We help Chinese companies grow their customers abroad. They use Facebook ads to find more customers. For example, Lenovo used Facebook ads to sell its new phone. In China, I also see economic growth. We admire it.
If you grew up, and you never had a computer, and you've never used the Internet, and someone asked you if you wanted to buy a data plan, your response would be 'What's a data plan, and why would I want to use this?'
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.
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.
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.
I think humans are just hard-wired to process people's faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.
It's really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.
About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.
I started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then.
Our goal is not to build a platform; it's to be cross all of them.
When Facebook was getting started, nothing used real identity - everything was anonymous or pseudonymous - and I thought that real identity should play a bigger part than it did.
The amount of trust and bandwidth that you build up working with someone for five, seven, 10 years? It's just awesome. I care about openness and connectedness in a global sense.
We're running the company to serve more people.
The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.
I like making things. I don't like getting my picture taken.
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.
I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that's always existed.
The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.
I think a lot of the time there isn't such a black-and-white difference between what's a platform and what's an app. It's really just like the most important apps become platforms.
I remember flying in, driving down 101 in a cab, and passing by all these tech companies like Yahoo! I remember thinking, 'Maybe someday we'll build a company. This probably isn't it, but one day we will.'
Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.
If you're always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.
Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.
Our philosophy is that we care about people first.
I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.
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.
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.
Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.
There are good examples of companies - Coca-Cola is one - that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come.
Hackathons are these things where just all of the Facebook engineers get together and stay up all night building things. And, I mean, usually at these hackathons, I code too, just alongside everyone.
I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.
We are a mission-driven company. In order to do this, we have to build a great team. And in order to do that, you need people to know they can make a bunch of money. So we need a business model to make a lot of money.
I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.
The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
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.
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.
When I started Facebook from my dorm room in 2004, the idea that my roommates and I talked about all the time was a world that was more open.
Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.
Connectivity is a human right.
Mobile is a lot closer to TV than it is to desktop.
I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person. It's a pretty good test.
I wear the same outfit or, at least, a different copy of it almost every day.
The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.
The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'
I'm trying to make the world a more open place.
Move fast with stable infrastructure.
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don't check in code anymore.
It wasn't until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.
People like to talk about war.
When we are thinking about stuff like embeds, we are not thinking about how we are competing with YouTube. We are thinking about how are we going to make it more useful for people to share stuff on Facebook.
A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: 'If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?'
I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges... If I want to get information about you, I just go to TheFacebook, type in your name, and it hopefully pulls up all the information I'd care to know about you.
It's a juicy thing to say we're building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it's so clearly the wrong strategy for us.
When we were a smaller company, Facebook login was widely adopted, and the growth rate for it has been quite quick. But in order to get to the next level and become more ubiquitous, it needs to be trusted even more.
A lot of people are focused on taking over the world or doing the biggest thing and getting the most users. I think part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely.
Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don't do that by having a service people pay for.
I actually don't read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.
It's, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we've had some very serious ups and downs.
I believe we have to nip Ebola in the bud before it spreads through Africa and to other countries.
Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January.
There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn't how we've approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.
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.
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.
