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.
Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know - not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that's kind of different from the information you put in your profile.
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.'
I do think that we're gonna move towards this world where eventually you'll be able to capture a whole experience that you're in and be able to send that to someone.
Our philosophy is that we care about people first.
While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.
If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.
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.
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.
I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world... If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.
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.
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.
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's a level of service that we could provide when we're just at Harvard that we can't provide for all of the colleges, and there's a level of service that we can provide when we're a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things.
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.
We talk about this concept of openness and transparency as the high-level ideal that we're moving towards at Facebook. The way that we get there is by empowering people to share and connect. The combination of those two things leads the world to become more open.
The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.
Video is growing very quickly on Facebook. A lot of people compare that to YouTube. I think that kind of makes sense. YouTube isn't the only video service, but I think it's the biggest, and it probably makes more sense to compare Facebook video to YouTube rather than Netflix because that's a completely different kind of content.
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.
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.
