Mark Zuckerberg

There may be some larger company that has some distribution advantage, but like, I don't know, large companies are slow and they lack conviction. One of the kind of things that I've thought about from time to time is, like, why was it the case that we were able to build Facebook and that some other company didn't, right? It wasn't like it was a super novel idea, right? I mean, there was Friendster before, there was MySpace, there's all this stuff. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all, like, had versions of it. Why didn't they do it? It's not that they had a lack of talent, right? I mean, we were, like, a ragtag group of children, right?

It's like, and they had, like, all these, like, serious, you know, engineers. Serious engineers? And, like, serious infrastructure. And so I kind of think the reason is because people doubt new ideas before they come to fruition, right? So the narrative with social networking is, like, ah, just like this college kid thing. It's like, okay, fine, maybe not college kids, but it's probably a fad. Oh, okay, maybe it seems like it's going to be around for a while, but it's probably not going to make money. Oh, it's making money, but the switch to mobile is going to be pretty hard. And then it's like, okay, by the time we figured that out, it was too late for anyone.

The companies had lost their advantage. And so what was the issue? I don't know. There's, like, like, there's probably some team buried deep inside those companies that believed in it, and probably some, like, VP person who is like, eh, that's probably not the biggest priority, and just, like, you know, pour some, like, I don't know, sand in the gears or whatever analogy you want. Even for the things that look like they belong to large companies as opportunities because they have a big distribution advantage, I would guess that big companies are going to fumble two -thirds of those, right? And then there are all these things where there is not an apparent big advantage because it plugs into an existing distribution channel, and those are just kind of free.

So, let's see.

So one thing that I think generally sucks about the mobile ecosystem is that you have these two gatekeeper companies, Apple and Google, that can tell you what you're allowed to build. So there's the economic version of that, which is like, all right, we build something, and they're just like, I'm going to take a bunch of your money. But then there's the qualitative version, which is actually what kind of upsets me more, which is there's a bunch of times when we've launched or wanted to launch features, and then Apple's just like, nope, you're not launching that. It's like, that sucks. Right? The question is, are we kind of set up for a world like that with AI, where like, you're going to get a handful of companies that run these closed models that are going to be in control of the APIs, and therefore going to be able to tell you what you can build?

Well, for one, I can say for us, it is worth it to go build a model ourselves to make sure that we're not in that position, right? Like, I don't want any of those other companies telling us what we can build. From an open source perspective, I think a lot of developers don't want those companies telling them what they can build either. I know there's a lot of cases where if this ends up being like, you know, like our databases or caching systems or architecture, we'll get valuable contributions from the community that will make our stuff better. And then our app specific work that we do, will still be so differentiated that it won't really matter.

I would guess that like sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we'll reach the point where like most of the code is written by AI. And I don't mean like auto -complete. I'm talking more like you give it a goal, it can run tests, it writes higher quality code than like the average very good person on the team already. I think that that's going to be a really important part of this for sure. But I don't know if that's the whole game. One way to think about this is this is a massive space. I don't think that there's just going to be like one company with one optimization function that serves everyone as best as possible.

I think that there are a bunch of different labs that are going to be doing leading work towards different domains. Some are going to be more enterprise focused or coding focused. Some are going to be productivity focused. Some are going to be more social or entertainment focused. There's going to be a lot of the stuff that's just like fun and entertaining and like shows up in your feed. I think that there's just like a huge amount of space. And going towards this AGI future, there are a bunch of common threads for what needs to get invented. But there are a lot of things at the end of the day that need to get created.

when an organization is growing quickly, one of the big questions that teams face is, do I hire this person who's in front of me now because they seem good? Or do I hold out to get someone who's even better? And the heuristic that I always focused on for myself and my own kind of direct hiring that I think works when you recurse it through the organization is that you should only hire someone to be on your team if you would be happy working for them in an alternate universe. And something that kind of works and that's basically how I've tried to build my team. I'm not in a rush to not be running the company, but I think in an alternate universe where one of these other folks was running the company, I'd be happy to work for them.

I feel like I'd learn from them. I respect their kind of general judgment. They're all very insightful. They have good values. You can apply that at every layer. And I think if you apply that at every layer in the organization, then you'll have a pretty strong organization.

I actually think we're probably gonna go hire more customer support people. Almost three and a half billion people use our services every day. And one question that we've struggled with forever is like, how do we provide customer support? We've never seriously been able to contemplate having like voice support where someone can just call in with three and a half billion people using your service every day. I mean, there'd be like a massive, massive number of people, like the biggest call center in the world type of thing. But now as the AI gets better, you're gonna get to this place where the AI can handle a bunch of people's issues.

Kind of like self -driving cars can handle a bunch of terrain, but in general, they're not like doing the whole route by themselves yet. Going back to this customer support thing, it's like, all right, it wouldn't make sense for us to staff out calling for everyone, but let's say the AI can handle 90 % of that. Then like, if it can't handle it, then it kicks it off to a person. Okay, now like if you've gotten the cost of providing that service down to one -tenth of what it would have otherwise been, all right, maybe now that actually makes sense to go do. The kind of common belief that people have is that like, oh, this is clearly just gonna automate jobs and like all these jobs are gonna go away.

That has not really been how the history of technology has worked. It's been, you know, you like create things that take away 90 % of the work and that leads you to want more people, not less.

Every new important technology needs a new class of devices in order to make it first class. And I think glasses have three main advantages. One is that they help preserve this sense of presence when you're there with another person. I mean, you take out your phone, you're gone from the moment. Glasses have the ability to bring that back. Two is that glasses, I think, are the ideal form factor for AI. It's the only device type where you can let an AI see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day. Soon it's going to be able to just generate a UI visually for you and your vision in real time.

And then the third thing that glasses can do, it's really the only form factor that can bring together the physical world that you have around you with realistic holograms and blend those together. One of the crazier things about living in the modern world is that we have this incredibly rich online world and you access it through this like five inch screen most of the time. Only a matter of time before these two things are basically fully merged and glasses enable all of that.

When you first launched, in the very beginning, the features were profile with a profile photo and your name and who you are. And also you included things like what house you lived in and what courses you were taking. Do you think it would have worked without that? Would it have been enough just to have profiles? It's a really interesting question. And we certainly since then have evolved and wanted to make a more general service, so we've dropped some of those things. But I remember there's this early debate that Dustin and I had where we had to do some manual work for every school that we released Facebook at.

And in order to do that, we basically went through and we parsed the course catalogs of the schools to make sure that the data was clean. And I remember having this debate where Dustin was like, we could just expand so much faster or it would just be easier. We were bound by server capacity. But it would be easier to launch new schools if we didn't have to have course catalogs for each school. And we just had this really long debate about what quality meant for us and the community that we wanted to establish and the culture of it. And in retrospect, maybe it wouldn't have had a huge difference on how things played out.

But it definitely set this tone where there's a lot of kind of clean data on Facebook. You can rely on it. It feels like a college -specific thing, which was valuable early on for setting the culture, even though obviously since then we've grown beyond that. And, you know, I think you guys in the projects that you work on, you're going to have a lot of similar questions, right? I mean, there's the famous 80 -20 rule where you get 80 % of the benefit by doing 20 % of the work. But you can't just 80 -20 everything, right? I mean, there have to be certain things that you just are the best at, right, and that you go way further than anyone else at to establish this kind of quality bar and have your product be the best thing that's out there.

So, you know, whether we had to do that one or had to do something, we had to do, I think, enough of those things or else we just wouldn't have been the best service out there.

I basically don't believe in delegation. Fundamentally, if there is a decision that I want to be involved with, I'm going to be involved in it. And I think that that's generally a good way for founders to operate. I think it's like if you're running the company and you're on the hook for everything and there's like something that's important at whatever level of detail in the organization, I don't get the logic of saying I'm not going to be involved in that. You want to be able to just have the cultural expectation that things are not going to be so hierarchical and like you're just going to dive into whatever you want.

There's this stat that I always think is crazy. The average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends or something. But the average person wants more connectivity and connection than they have. So, you know, there's a lot of questions that people ask of stuff like, okay, is this going to replace in -person connections or real -life connections? And my default is that the answer to that is probably no. You know, I think that there are all these things that are better about kind of physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don't have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.

So I think that a lot of these things that today there might be a little bit of a stigma around, I would guess that over time we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable and why the people who are doing these things, why they are rational for doing it and how it is adding value for their lives. But also I think that the field is very early. There are a handful of companies and stuff who are doing virtual therapists and virtual girlfriend type stuff. But it's very early.

You didn't sell for $1 billion. Presumably, there's some amount you would have sold for, right? If you're already $5 trillion, of course you would have sold. How did you think about that choice? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I think some of these things are just personal. I don't know at the time that I was sophisticated enough to do that analysis. But I had all these people around me who were making all these arguments for how like billion dollars was, you know, it's like, here's the revenue that we need to make and here's how big we need to be. And like, it's clearly so many years in the future.

Like, it was very far ahead of where we were at the time. I think I sort of deep down believed in what we were doing. And I did some analysis. I was like, okay, well, what would I go do if I wasn't doing this? It's like, well, I really like building things. And I like helping people communicate. And I like understanding what's going on with people and the dynamics between people. So I think if I sold this company, I'd just go build another company like this. And I kind of like the one I have. So, I mean, you know, why, right? But I don't know. I think a lot of the biggest bets that people make are often just based on conviction and values.

It's actually usually very hard to do the analyses trying to connect the dots forward. Yeah.

2022 is I'm assuming when you started acquiring these H100s. Back then, how did you know to get the H100s? How did you know we'll need the GPUs? It was because we were working on reels. So, you know, we got into this situation where we needed more GPUs to train the models. It was this big evolution for our services where instead of just ranking content from people who you follow, we made this push to basically start recommending content from people that you're not following. So now the corpus of content candidates that we could potentially show you expanded from, you know, on the order of thousands to on the order of hundreds of millions.

So completely different infrastructure. And we started working on doing that. And we were constrained on basically the infrastructure that we had to catch up to what TikTok was doing as quickly as we would have wanted to. So I basically looked at that and I was like, hey, we have to make sure that we're never in this situation again. So let's order enough GPUs to do what we need to do on reels and ranking content and feed. But let's also let's double that. There's going to be something on the horizon that we can't see yet. Did you know it'd be AI? At the time, I thought it was probably going to be more something that had to do with content.

Actually, most of the times I think where we make some decision that ends up seeming good is because we messed something up before. And just didn't want to repeat the mistake.

We never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that. For a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, well, we're this kind of one thing. And it's one of the things that I observed as soon as I came out to the valley, that all these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The CEO wasn't technical. The board of directors had no one technical on it. They had one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical, and everyone else wasn't. It's like, all right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company.

So I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about, and I think that there's a balance, right? It's like you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too. But if you don't have enough of your share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. I define our strategy as if we can learn faster than every other company, we're going to win. We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first or early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to learn what people like better than other people.

I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company. Build good foundation. Like, learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world and just iterate as quickly as you can. Build good foundation.