Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerbergis an American programmer, Internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is the chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder of the social networking website Facebook. His net worth is estimated to be US$54.9 billion, as of July 2016, ranking him as the 5th richest person in the world...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth14 May 1984
CityWhite Plains, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I think as a company, if you can get two things right--having a clear direction on what you are trying to do and bringing in great people who can execute on the stuff--then you can do pretty well.
I think there's confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals - some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we're trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information.
I think I've grown and learned a lot
At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.
If the original Facebook was the first five minutes [of a conversation] and the stream was the next 15, what I want to show you today is the rest-the next few hours of a deep engaging conversation.
When you want to change things, you can't please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren't making enough progress.
If you don't risk anything you risk everything
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.
Find that thing you are super passionate about.
People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.
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.
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.
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 started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then.