Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working.
> Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?"
> Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working, and I think that...if you look at the data of the very best companies that have gotten built, I actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time. A local maximum, sorry.
Creating a company that gives people jobs and provides customers with a positive NPV service or product also makes the world a better place. A successful company can tremendous value to the world, even if it only provides a fraction of that for the owner to give to charity.
I suspect it's probably a wash. Donating to a Givewell charity has less risk certainly, but a successful startup on the order of Facebook will change the world by multiple orders of magnitude more. The expected value is probably similar.
People overestimate the positive impact of technology. Of course in Silicon Valley you're considered crazy if you don't believe technology solves everything. But it's not as simple as that. My grandparents for example, had no internet, no Facebook, no iPhones. They're doing great and have led very fulfilling lives. Most of the positivity in their lives came from their relationship with each other and their kids. Of course they are only one example, and that is not a lot of data. But we know that there are millions of people in Silicon Valley right now who have the fastest internet, the most amazing social media apps, they are young and can take advantage of all the modern technology in existence, and yet they might feel isolated and be totally depressed in their lives.
>People overestimate the positive impact of technology. Of course in Silicon Valley you're considered crazy if you don't believe technology solves everything. But it's not as simple as that. My grandparents for example, had no internet, no Facebook, no iPhones. They're doing great and have led very fulfilling lives. Most of the positivity in their lives came from their relationship with each other and their kids. Of course they are only one example, and that is not a lot of data. But we know that there are millions of people in Silicon Valley right now who have the fastest internet, the most amazing social media apps, they are young and can take advantage of all the modern technology in existence, and yet they might feel isolated and be totally depressed in their lives.
I mean, technology is probably not going to make rich people's lives better at this point unless it removes some substantial annoyance. I suspect that like money, there's diminishing returns after a certain point.
But, for someone who has never had internet before, to get connected (one of Mark's three stated goals in the video) is life changing.
It comes down to definitions. What is "positive impact" to you? To me, it means "increasing the total amount of human understanding", not "making everybod happy and Amish".
I'd like to barge in and call false dichotomy on this. Despite the excellent citation, I don't think it's correct. I believe technology should let people enjoy more of their lives, not replace it. Understanding is essential to this, but it becomes cheaper as your technology improves, so you're not sacrificing happiness at a fixed rate. We've already gone from industrial steam engines to tiny glass wonder-phones in a couple hundred years, what if technology continues to become less intrusive? Maybe we'll all be look amish yet be omnipotent.
You can read about humans, to understand humans you have to form relationships with them and experience them yourself. An analogy would be reading K&R compared to bashing against GCC.
Trouble with giving to charities is it's not very personal. Ok you may increase the world's anti malaria budget from $1.5bn to $1.50001bn but you can't turn around and say look at this cool thing I built.
Building a cool thing and changing the world are two very different things. Some individuals sincerely believe that working on any startup is intrinsically altruistic and 'changes the world' - Silicon Valley (the TV show) lampoons this and correctly so. You are not "making the world a better place through minimal message-oriented transport layers"
Although the things that have changed the world have generally been cool. Tech like the electric motor, jet aviation, the printing press. Also intellectual works like those of Keynes or Marx. Less so with charitable donations. Personally I'm thinking of trying stuff and figure I've got more of a chance of making a difference by innovating rather than donating a bit.
Okay so I don't agree with "don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working" part.
Airbnb example comes to mind where all the founders exhausted all their credit cards to fund user acquisitions and when that did not work kept trying other innovative means to keep the company afloat. If they would have followed this advice, there would not have been an AirBnB.
I agree with the part that says " entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about" and keep pursuing it with perseverance. Because then companies like AirBnB are built. Just saying.
During an interview[1] (with one of the AirBnB founders no less), pg offered the general advice that startups should search for success using a hill climbing algorithm, and not worry about dangerous local maximums; only to be immediately confronted with the counter example of AirBnB (the cereal episode).
That company just seems to be an outlier in multiple categories.
I'm not sure the AirBnB guys with hindsight would have followed that policy again. They may have been better tweaking the model till it seemed to work rather than maxing the credit cards on a non working model perhaps. They were kind of failing and losing money till joining YC so the pre YC strategy may not have been great.
"I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things. You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, 'Luck favors the prepared mind.' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not."
The fact that they were able to replicate their success multiple times, just like Einstein, and that they're all smart, just like Einstein, says that there's probably some aspect of talent involved in their success.
If it was purely based on luck, without any talent involved, you'd expect billion dollar companies to be more evenly distributed, and not cluster among certain individuals.
After you've had success in the valley, people are willing to fling money at you for just about anything.
This factor alone accounts for a large percentage of repeat successes. Square probably never would have obtained the capital necessary to become competitive, had it not been for Twitter.
But honestly, for all their funding, even most of these second tries turn out to be failures. What you're really doing here is confusing selection bias with skill: take a pool of enough entrepreneurs, and eventually, just by chance, you'll find someone who has repeat successes.
>But honestly, for all their funding, even most of these second tries turn out to be failures. What you're really doing here is confusing selection bias with skill: take a pool of enough entrepreneurs, and eventually, just by chance, you'll find someone who has repeat successes.
The fact that there's even more than one company on it that has a repeat founder suggests that there's something more than selection bias going on her, given the sheer amount of startups started every year.
So the next thing we could do is take a look at if there's other correlations to these repeat founders besides their ability to get capital. I would argue that the fact that most of them are intelligent at least merits a look as a FACTOR that might help them.
> If it was purely based on luck, without any talent involved, you'd expect billion dollar companies to be more evenly distributed, and not cluster among certain individuals.
I agree with you that talent is a thing. That said, the Matthew effect is also a thing. Winning tends to compound – partially because talented people are repeatedly successful, but even lucky untalented people can be repeatedly successful because of all the attention they get.
The example that's coming to my mind now is a little silly but – there are lots of funny people on Twitter who barely get any retweets, and there are moderately funny things said by popular people on Twitter who get tonnes of retweets and responses suggesting that they're the funniest people ever.
It takes a lot of work and/or luck (probably usually both) to get to the point where people just lap up everything you say, but once you're there, there IS a certain Halo effect of sorts.
Would you? You'd expect a bell curve; a small number of complete failures of entrepreneurs, lots of moderate but eventually failed attempts, lots of moderate but somewhat successful businessmen, and a couple of repeatedly successful ones. You got three. And all that's compounded by the way that success in one business, even if it was purely by luck, drastically increases the likelihood of success in another simply by giving you more capital. How successful has Elon Musk been? He started one reasonably successful company, then got in early at a very successful one, and has been using the capital from those ventures to fund interesting projects--but as cool as Tesla and Spacex are, I wouldn't call them wins yet.
In the long run, luck and genius are probably both necessary but not sufficient; I have no doubt that Zuckerberg's a very smart guy, I just think there are many, many people just as smart who aren't billionaires.
scientific discoveries are the result of iterations upon leads and ideas, most of which require time spent doing lots of different things. Which I think is the heart of what Hamming is getting to.
Some people are just much better organized. I studied physics at a pretty good school. A lot of my classmates were very smart and hard workings. We spend easily 8 hours a day doing problem sets. Then we had an exchange student who cam from France (from the Prepas system) and he was just so much more organized with his work. He would sit down and very carefully read the chapter, make sure he understood everything. Then work through each problem carefully and then spend the rest of the day relaxing. Till he was done he wouldn't get distracted, check his phone, shoot the shit classmates. Just a very focused mind.
Looking back at college it was easily 80% worrying about doing work and 20% actually doing it. With something like programming, knowing how to use a debugger, profiler and an IDE give you a huge leg up. Easily 95% of CS students never take the time to learn the tools b/c you have to do it on your own time - but you have other homework to stress out about.
You can say that about any successful person/company.
Sure, luck may have played a large role in Facebook's initial success. But that was over 10 years ago. Many companies experience that initial success and then go nowhere, e.g. MySpace. Facebook, on the other hand, has continuously surpassed everyone's expectations. It's not until recently that people have began to accept that Facebook is here to stay. Discounting Facebook's repeated successes as luck is just silly.
Building a $350B company does not happen from luck, it requires a constant stream of good decision making.
I agree that the luck angle needs to be tempered by considering that there are many ways to accidentally destroy a good thing. It should also be recognized that luck is required to prevent other, bigger companies from catching on to you before you're big enough to stand up for yourself.
I don't want to discount merit or work, but we too often seriously discount luck. Luck plays a large part in every success. That's not to say that people are justified in being unsuccessful; it's just to recognize that we're all involved in something larger than ourselves.
As failure doesn't always correlate to incompetence, success doesn't always correlate to competence.
Of course it is luck. When they decide to do something new they never know if it's gonna work. If it doesn't work out or if it does work out tons of people come afterwards with tales of "they were stupid if they thought that was the answer" or "These people are smart and they surely knew what they were doing".
I am not trying to lessen his feat but just saying that luck is a big part of it.
Pareto principle applied to homework, study, and grades.
I spent way too much time worrying about grades. I'm not sure it mattered. It would have been just as good (and probably more enjoyable) to be a B-student with awesome side projects rather than an A-student with none.
(And often, esp. for college, one doesn't even need to make that trade-off when homework is largely immaterial, and your grade only depends on exams.)
I feel like everyone thinks this way in retrospect, but at the time it's so much harder. It's hard to accept not being at the top of everything even when you know they're just local maxima.
There was an HBS article about how both Microsoft and Facebook were started during Harvard reading week because putting all the smart people there and making them bored during time off resulted in productive projects. Trying to find it...
Harvard is a notoriously easy school - once you get in classes are relatively easy. Grade inflation is rampant.
I say this as someone who got in (eventually chose to attend a different school for a variety of reasons) and with many friends who went there.
At Harvard, the primary thing you do is the extracurricular in your field of interest - whether that's law, activism or startups - is up to the individual student. Your grades, your education and your brand in society - Harvard takes care of that.
MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface.
Neither had talented people.
Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social.
Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment.
But in the end - forget culture - the basic features were just better, and for every great feature, there are 'smart things' happening internally that are good. Zuck deserves credit for that.
I used to work a little bit with MySpace. Their culture was 'LA Cool Kid' i.e. 'The Standard' hang-out types.
They reminded me of a Record Label - totally hip - totally useless. I feel sorry for any Engineer that had to work at MySpace.
If you knew the culture at Lycos, Excite etc. - and compare it to Google, it's a little bit of a similar story.
Yes, Facebook had better strategy. They embraced new tech to streamline the pain factor of navigating the website, whereas MySpace tried to optimize for discrete page views to serve more ads. MySpace would serve an entire interstitial page load with nothing but ads to get to different parts of its interface, whereas Facebook would embrace ways to jump to your friends' profiles or read your messages quickly, often without reloading the page.
It reminds me of how Google won the search engine war by delivering a more streamlined, less exploitative product.
And then of course there were a couple innovations that neither MySpace or Friendster had: photos with tags of your friends, and the concept of the News feed. It's hard to imagine a social network without those features, but they didn't exist before Facebook introduced them.
Agreed. I think the larger point I was trying to make is there is always a bit of luck somewhere somehow that contributes to overall success. In the case of Facebook, it came in the form of lousy products such as Friendster and Myspace.
He got to learn from Myspace and got to build Winklevoss's Harvard Connection for them. After that became great, he did some entirely new stuff thanks to his prepared mind... wait, no, he just ran off with others ideas to implement them himself on a bigger scale... stealing all the glory. Not in same category as Einstein or Shannon at all. ;)
Imagine how much science would have Einstein done if he was sent to the camps. Of course luck is not everything but it is still a huge part of the equation. Just being born where he was born helped Pasteur a lot.
You do not need to be extremely lucky to "make the world a better place". If that is truly your goal, you can definitely do that without building a startup, without getting extremely lucky, without spending 80 hours a week working on ideas.
I'm very much convinced that nearly everybody on this site who claims to want to make the world "a better place" just want to start their startup, earn their money and financial freedom, and tell themselves "they made the world a better place".
Snarky as fuck, yes indeed. I'm just beyond tired hearing all this bullshit, at least be honest with yourselves. If this does not apply to you, then it doesn't. If it does, please rethink your goals in life.
I generally agree with your views. I think a large part of the problem is that we've all been (self) deluded into thinking technology can solve all our problems. The older I get, the clearer it becomes, though, that the root of all our problems is psychological. Outside of transhuman genetic engineering or human-replacing AI, I don't see how technology can fix our psychology.
You can't see how technology can "fix" psychology?
The most obvious way is direct through e.g. drugs. There's a very wide spectrum of potential futures here from nootropics to brave-new-worldesque soma.
The less obvious way is that technology alters your surroundings, which in turn influence your psychology.
Neither scenario seems particularly implausible to me.
The kind of psychological problems I'm talking about aren't the kind that are fixed by drugs. I'm talking about things like values and beliefs. I'm calling it psychology because I don't know what else to call it; perhaps mindset would be a better name.
The good part is that if you are working on something you care about, you won't be as upset when you fail if you were building something just to become the next Zuck.
> The good part is that if you are working on something you care about, you won't be as upset
This probably varies from person to person, but failing at something I care about would make me much more upset than failing at something I didn't really care about.
I think he means if it's important to you it's still worth trying and if you fail at least you were trying. Whereas if it's just a business, "nothing personal," then failing means you've got nothing, not even the feeling of working on something important to you.
In this [1] Tim Ferris podcast Peter Thiel states about Zuckerberg (paraphrasing here): "the more time you spent with him the more you realise it is not luck."
I think Zuckerberg's success had more to do with being able to identify valuable contributors and convince them to join the Facebook team. He isn't responsible for generating many of the important features or business decisions, though he certainly has to approve of them. In that way, his primary skillset is very similar to that of Jobs and other successful entrepreneurs.
> He isn't responsible for generating many of the important features or business decisions, though he certainly has to approve of them.
Alternative way of framing this: Any CEO who is personally responsible for generating most of the important features or business decisions in his company is incompetent at hiring and delegating
I'd call him being born in the US in a kinda wealthy family a huge amount of luck. I never said that what he did is a small feat, but let's be real if he was born in the slums of India none of his smart would have been useful.
nice find. i liked the comment at the end where he says he is optimistic because no all the great ideas have been found. i think if your in the start up game and have failed a lot of times you can start to feel that you were too late
The entrepreneur pits his willpower against the entropy of nature. Nature is huge and moves randomly, while the entrepreneur is small and moves purposefully.
There is definitely luck in nature's random movements. But the entrepreneur small purposeful movements add up over time and overcome nature.
Zuckerberg actually understands that. So it is refreshing to see him receive advice from Sam[1], one of the five greatest founders in the past 40 years!
That they do, but the problem with taking the conversation in this direction is that it gets us all thinking in terms of how some people have had it easier, instead of what we can do that's valuable of our own.
I'd counter that taking it in this direction can actually help you get more honest with yourself about what value you can provide. For example, if you don't have wealth or privilege behind you, you may should maybe focus being the technical founder rather than the CEO in a start up situation. if you buy into the myth that everyone has an equal shot it can be quite discouraging and at the same time mystifying as to why things aren't working out. If you have a clear sense of ALL the inputs that your favorite startup success had going for it, then you can make informed decisions about what you have to offer and what you are likely capable given your particular set of inputs and resources.
It's more a question of how you mention it. The difference can have a big impact on the conversation. For example, snarky or cynical one liners produce more of the same, and so do thoughtful reflections. We're hoping for thoughtful reflections here.
It also challenges people to think how to structure a society that maximizes peoples ability to work at this level. The folks who figure out how to put 'everyone' in a position to make successful startups with have contributed orders of magnitude more value to society than any single startup.
If it takes 100 years for one man, it will only take a month for a company or community ... Some problems can't simply be fixed by one man alone. And it's better to own little of something then all of nothing ... Look at for example Elon Musk. He only owned like 5% of the companies he started once they where sold.
Also Facebook only had a few thousand users when Zuckerberg started to bring more people in to work on it.
I know you're joking, but in case it isn't obvious - Mythical man month doesn't apply outside dev. Sales/marketing people can actually deliver a baby in 4 weeks.
"In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated Barnaby’s output as 42-man years."
In the case of Elon Musk (and for the record others like Mark Cuban) something tells me you don't make billions of dollars without a (from a modern perspective) massively disproportionate ownership share. Zuckerberg gets off from this because FB is an outlier in terms of it's value, he didn't need as large a percentage to make as much, but Musk does not.
Musk owned like 11% of Paypal once it sold for 1.5B, while Zuckerberg owned around 20% of Facebook when it IPO:ed for like 5B. The takeaway though is that it's better to own 10% of one Billion then 90+% of nothing. And great things can only be achieved while working together.
Zuckerberg was lucky with a big jump on valuations on Series B Peter Thiel didn't invest because of the runaway valuation, later he regretted [1], and being a "Solo-Founder" :) if standard funding history with 2 co-founders Zuckerberg should have IPO with 5%~10% stake.
I stand corrected. It was my belief that he made much more from the acquisition because of how much I thought he put into SpaceX and later Tesla, and therefore would have had a much higher equity percent then 11%. He seems to have had a much higher business acumen then I thought [1] (not to say I didn't think it was already pretty high).
That's when you've chosen too big a problem. Make it smaller. Find a piece you CAN solve. Then as you gain skill and power, expand. This works in every field.
For all the flack that Zuck is getting in this thread
It's pretty safe to ignore most of the flack in this thread. Most people vote with their feet (or wallets, or eyeballs, or attention), and they've voted that they love Facebook, regardless of what a minority of people in this thread say or upvote.
Nerds have a cantankerous side and are as prone to virtue signalling as any other group. Those of us who read Slashdot ages ago may remember the Microsoft hate it hosted and the way every year was going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. Well, Microsoft is still here; Linux on the desktop is still a minority pursuit; and most people never cared that much about the OS they used.
The specific target nerd derision has changed some, but the form of the attack and disdain has not. Any company or country or person's haters is proportionate to its size. Look at what people do and how they behave rather than what they say.
There's a difference between loving Facebook, and begrudgingly using it because that's where my friends/family are.
Facebook sucks, not just because of confusing UI, or because of silent changes to privacy settings, or because it's one stop shopping for scary three-letter-agencies, but because the network effect is so damned strong, it will take a monumental misstep for it to become the next Myspace.
Coercion - even subtle social coercion - only works up to a point. If you piss off people enough they'll reward you with zero loyalty, no matter how popular you think you are.
FB is vulnerable unless it keeps its users very happy. Currently it has a monopoly on a product that's actually quite mediocre and frustrating in many ways, and not seen as particularly cool.
If it has to face real competition, it's going to have issues.
There are specific times when you can unseat a behemoth, and those times are when new markets and new platforms arrive.
How is FB doing in China? How are the Chinese doing with AI, AR/VR, and mobile?
Anyone looking at China can see that it's becoming competitive with the US. So far the software markets are largely separate, but I think it's naive to believe that's still going to be true 10-20 years from now.
I would think that it does - would not the usage habits be entirely different between the two groups?
Also, hating Facebook makes jumping ship so much easier - my wife uses Instagram primarily now instead of Facebook. Yes I know Facebook owns Instagram, but there are other social platforms people are jumping to.
What you're saying is all true, esp. virtue signalling. But, one can admire Zuck as an individual (Harvard educated, code wizard, able to learn Chinese and become almost fluent at it while running Facebook, etc.) and still think Facebook changed the world for the worst.
Google and Microsoft gave us tools that enabled us to work faster and do things we couldn't do before (esp. Google); Facebook is just addictive but doesn't enable anything.
I would rather "the future" didn't include more of Facebook.
I don't think he is getting much flack. I think he is more like Bill Gates with some luck involved. Let us not try to put him in the same bucket as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Facebook started as a way to hook up college students, remember poke? It did not start out as a vision to connect the world
Since a solid five minutes of the interview are devoted to Mark explaining how he never expected to start a company, let alone do anything as big as "connect the world", I don't think this is much of a rebuttal of anything. What makes you think Steve Jobs belongs in a "better" bucket than Mark? Even at his grandest vision he just made phones. They were good phones, sure, but he never tried to do anything bigger.
Imagine a textbook 500 years in the future (there won't be physical textbooks of course, but whatever students are using as a learning tool then)... Who do you think will be profiled in that textbook? Bill Gates? Warren Buffet? Larry Ellison? Steve Jobs? Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe any or all of those people, but then again, maybe not, I bet Elon Musk will be there.
> Most people vote with their feet (or wallets, or eyeballs, or attention), and they've voted that they love Facebook, regardless of what a minority of people in this thread say or upvote.
Plenty of people in the HN demographic also vote with their feet by quitting FB.
You don't have to be a billionaire to see those being important. Hopefully we'll have a more benevolent entity than Facebook bringing us into that future.
"[The next computing platform] - I think that's going to be virtual reality and augmented reality."
You have to listen to Zuckerberg on this, because he's good at understanding what people will put up with. I never expected that a sizable portion of the population would walk around looking at smartphones, totally losing situational awareness. Even when not playing Pokemon Go. But that became socially acceptable.
The failure of Google Glassholes seemed to indicate that artificial reality was going to be socially unacceptable. But Zuckerberg might be able to sell it to society. Microsoft talks about it as an office tool (see their "HoloLens" stuff) but that may be the wrong vision.
The right vision may be "Hyperreality".[1] This is a must-see for anybody thinking about artificial reality. These people are much closer to a realistic vision than Microsoft is. (Watch at 1080p if possible.)
I agree that's a must watch, but how is it not just HoloLens + 10 years + Ridley Scott (edit plus get me out of here)? It's a bit unfair to compare an artist's vision to a functioning (and almost shipping) device.
Technically, this AR hardware [1] could do Hyperreality.
Technology isn't the problem. It's "why bother"? Zuckerberg is thinking of AR as a social system. That implies something much more like Hyperreality than Microsoft's system. Remember, there is not, as yet, a killer app for VR, even though good hardware has been available for years now.
What about privacy? Doctors in my country (France) are legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data. A third-party cloud service, not so much.
Edit: To be more precise, I'm not saying that medical apps can't be done right. I'm just disagreeing with the implication that an efficient medical app is automatically a good thing.
Erm, in the United States we have HIPAA which directly makes "a third-party cloud service" "legally obliged to respect the privacy of their patients and the confidentiality of medical data". Besides, using AI doesn't have to mean using centralized cloud architecture.
> And finally, if you’re worried about your own gnarly ER visit showing up on Figure 1, the app is very careful about patient privacy. Every time anyone uploads an image, the first thing they do is fill out a consent form. Figure 1 has an algorithm that automatically obscures faces, and tools that let the user erase any pixels containing names, dates, or any other identifying details.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't say this app was brand new - he just mentioned that he became aware of it recently.
SkinVision has been around for 5 years. "It was founded in 2011 in Bucharest, Romania based on a PhD study to apply the mathematical theory ‘fractal geometry’ for medical imaging. Fractal geometry simulates natural growth of tissue and is widely used and documented in biology." [1]
Figure 1 isn't really the same thing. It's not a diagnostic tool, it doesn't store PHI, and a human reviews every image before it's visible in the app. Figure 1 is closer to Instagram than it is to the Watson stuff which is all HIPAA compliant.
I'm sure the same privacy conditions exist here in Australia too. However, when getting my skin checked, I asked the doctor about what she was looking for, out of curiosity. To explain, she pulled up vision of a problematic mole on someone else's file, and their name/details were visible.
> And just to make this point, how far into Facebook did it actually become a company?
> I don't know. I think it became a formal Delaware company when Peter Thiel invested about six months in.
Isn't this an outright lie? He sure stammered over his answer. He's joked himself about the fact that Edwardo incorporated Facebook as a Florida LLC originally.
This is how history gets rewritten to be more streamlined...
The fact is Zuckerberg was extremely ambitious about starting a company and had many attempts. That Florida LLC could've been dissolved easily if Facebook had failed. There's no downside to incorporating really.
"His plan: Reduce Saverin's stake in TheFacebook.com by creating a new company, a Delaware corporation, to acquire the old company (the Florida LLC formed in April), and then distribute new shares in the new company to everybody but Saverin."
Interesting interview, but I felt Sam could have asked more probing questions (for the lack of a better phrase) and I don't mean the controversies from the early days of Facebook.
What was the thinking behind acquiring WhatsApp for such a large amount of money and how will they monetize the platform? How is WhatsApp going to be an important part of the future?
Facebook's mission is to connect the world, but in the case of Free Basics, they violated net neutrality principles which is clearly not in the best interest of the users.
Mark Zuckerberg also mentions that he finds it frustrating that people talk about AI turning against humanity, which is one of the things that Elon Musk, Sam and OpenAI are trying to educate the population about. Maybe a discussion about that could have been included in the interview.
If any of the mods are reading this, maybe there could be some way that future interviews can include questions from HN? We could have a discussion about the questions that the HN community wants to ask, and the mods can pick out the questions that generate the most interest from the community?
Seems like a lot of those questions and deeper probing were off the table before the interview even started. Considering Sam Altman was doing the interview and the content was geared towards ycombinator, it was very startup focused.
"I think Peter [Thiel] was the person who told me this really pithy quote, 'In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.'"
Well, as he clarified, the hard part was the management team quitting.
But I think it's hard to be vulnerable when you reach that level of prominence... anything he says will be scrutinized and potentially be quoted for years to come, and will affect not only himself but everyone who works at Facebook. Even if you want to be authentic, there are powerful social forces which make you careful in what you say.
Here's how Peter Thiel wrote that event in Zero to One:
> “When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t. A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”
the whole thing was a very vanilla overview of what happened and what he plans to do. I hope this isn't what YC intends to with their podcast.
He should have spoken about one of the many times they were on the brink of disaster or the company shutting down, not some time where he got offered a $B.
I hope someone like Tim Ferriss can get a hold of Zuck for 2 hours, and chat to get an in-depth view of him. The dude is going to be remembered as the Edison of this century. He should share more about himself outside the context of fb and their products.
I came looking for a video that would talk about building the future and I am surprised Sam & Mark spent lot of time talking about FB origins and other things related to FB and talk future only for the last few minutes.
Its almost palpable the cold nature of the interview, they don`t shake hands nor greet each other as someone else noted the conversation seems very detached to say the least.
Why would their body language have anything to do with the content you were hoping for?
Yeah, the title is a bit more grandiose than just "Sam interviews Mark." I thought it was good. It's a huge topic that has hundreds of thought leaders so it's not like you should be expecting something mind blowing.
For me, it was valuable because the whole "building the future" thing is still very much rooted in existing institutions. Outside of Silicon Valley, everybody "knows" that if you want to do something really big you need a government or corporation to do it. Everybody believes it's impossible for one person or a small team to create an impact. It's good to remind people that Facebook is changing the world, but it started in a way that lots of people could start.
The symmetry of the staging adds another uncanny element: the frontal camera angles and the identical chairs add on top of the similarity in dress.
And you're right, the similar affect of the two -- the earnestness, the forward posture telegraphing intensity, the lack of humor -- all together, it is off-putting. Later in the interview, Sam leans back which seems to break this unpleasant symmetry.
The poor staging and lighting are responsible for most of what people are reacting negatively to in terms of body language and appearance. Terrible location for an interview for a number of reasons.
They do seem intensely earnest, but both of them always do in the interviews I've seen. I personally don't see that as a negative in this sort of context, however.
He gave away, or atleast appeared to give, 99% of his wealth away. I can think of better PR stunts for much less money. He is still a net positive person for me, who inspires me more than most others.
That's a generically cynical statement that you don't seem to have any specific basis for. In such cases, for HN purposes you should practice the Principle of Charity and err on the side of giving others the benefit of the doubt. It won't affect Zuckerberg much, but it will make this community better.
Ok, trying to follow Principle of Charity before dropping anti-Zuckerberg comment, were you saying the person you replied to might have not tried to understand the real meaning behind the comment they addressed or that we should be giving Zuckerberg's intent the benefit of the doubt at this point?
Then that's why that principle should not make it into the guidelines. It counters the long-standing principle of choosing a default interpretation of a person's behavior based on general and specific behavior over time. Mark Zuckerbergs business began with a series of crimes/deceptions, increased with even more where he betrayed his customers in various ways, he continued to lie about the value of privacy for ad revenue, and proved it wasn't just his belief by protecting his own privacy buying up all those houses near his. In business & personal life, he stayed a selfish, control freak who destroyed friend, stranger, and foes wherever for ego and esp profit. This pattern of behavior stretches back years.
So, it's rational to default on the belief that... after years of such behavior... his next move will be motivated by selfish gain (ego/control probablg) with potential deception. Also note that character assessment and source integrity ratings are standard practice of experienced journalists, police, and intelligence gathering. Example below in ratings section:
Also, my brief reading of Charity link suggested it fails instantly if person talking is a con artist or habitual liar. Like Zuckerberg but Frank Abignale of Catch Me if You Can even better example. Or litany of PR people working for companies always getting caught doing devious things with cover stories. The Empirical, evidence-over-time model handles both the good and the bad while the Charity model effectively encourages people to act like sheep in front of hungry, intelligent wolves. So, Im strongly against it being part of the guidelines of any forum.
Now, I do get the concept and still thank you for the link. Ill think on it more in the near future as I can see room for self-improvement. I suggest a lightweight version of it where we try to assume a reasonable/charitable version of a comment by default then reply to that or ask clarification before slamming it. No charitable version if person, claim, or topic has a consistent meaning that's neutral or negagive. Probability applies then. Misinformation that's easily disproven by linked evidence, as I often deal with, would be example. Maybe combine this with "keep it civil, focus on claims, and no personal attacks" a la FreeBSD's Code of Conduct. Might make a nice compromise between charity principle and reality.
Just a few of my thoughts for the team's consideration. Just concerned that guideline could censor comments that need to be there while protecting subtle trolls or unreliable sources from quickly being dealt with. It was a good idea but just goes too far into idealism in that link. Especially for discussions on... the Internet. ;)
You'll find instead that it will turn any community into an echo chamber. This sort of tone policing accomplishes nothing but belittling differing viewpoints and alienating users who may (publically or privately) disagree with charitable interpretations.
When the dust clears, you'll have a harmonious web forum -- in which no information is exchanged.
The fact that people have been saying this about HN for many years suggests that the argument isn't as strong as it sounds. What you describe is indeed a danger, but there are many dangers. Effective moderation must protect against all of them.
HN's way of balancing this is to require that comments be civil and substantive. Adding the principle of charity is simply a clarification of what that means.
The 'principle of charity' is not primarily about ethics or tone. It's about intellectual substance. It simply says that people should respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of an argument (or comment or phenomenon). What reason could anyone have for insisting on reacting to a weaker interpretation than they need to? I can think of a few, but none apply to a site that wants civil, substantive discourse.
If you're giving away so many billion, you might as well oversee yourself how they are going to be spent. What sketchiness do you see here? It was already his money.
Non-profits are regulated so it's transparent what they do with the money other people give them. In this case, it's Mark's own money. Even if he executed the sketchiest imaginable scheme, he's only wasting his own money. He is free to start a commercial company with it instead, but he decided the goal should be to do some good.
The time this will become a problem is the second the company accepts money from other people. Then I will join in picking up pitchforks.
Election campaigners of Trump/Hillary would cringe at this video.
Zuck's body language looks bad because of the chair their are using. It is slanted and Zuck is sitting straight. It makes him look less relaxed (like a job interview). Same with Sam Altman.
Complete lack of emotions in Zuck's eyes. It might be part of his personality but it makes him look very detached from what he is talking about.
I can relate to Mark having to disconnect from emotion or feeling in business. It's a very personal thing for me that I don't really want to get into, but it has to do with being consciously aware of free choices.
Calling BS on Mark, with FB new sponsored links in FB feed... this is total Business, not solving my problem or making my life better. To make the world a better place, Mark should have worked for FriendFeed.
It's disingenuous to claim that because a new feature isn't making your life better means he's failing at making the whole world better.
Maybe you're one of those 10-100K experiments where some engineer pushed something out to see if it worked. Maybe a new feature boosts revenue so they can build solar-powered internet planes that bring entire cities a connection. Maybe it's just noise and isn't actually relevant.
Is someone else surprised that Peter Thiel invested in Facebook when it had 100000 users and Mark Zuckerberg said that he planned to go back to college? What are the chances of that happening with a product today?
After FB any 19 year old with a product that has 100K users and is growing at a rate of FB I would guess would be showered with money (I am not a VC so my guess might be very wrong).
> ...It was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing. If you look at the management team that we had...
>Interviewer:
Did that whole management team leave?
>Mark:
The whole management team was gone within about a year after that.
That's an eye opener. Guess most people are in it for short term cash. I bet a lot of them regret leaving now.
Σ$0.04: Mark Zuckerberg mentions talk on the threat of AI as fear mungering, however, https://intelligence.org/ (MIRI) argues that advanced AI is a legitimate existential threat. Note that when MIRI speaks of "AI", they are not talking about fancy neural networks, but the fact that since humans are no where near any kind of upper bound on intelligence, and the space of possible Turing machines and self modifying algorithms is overwhelmingly large, plus reams of other arguments you , humans will eventually be able to produce computer programs with the capability of destroying civilisation.
N.B: This is my brief summary of what their stance seems to be, and isn't a direct quotation or paraphrasing of MIRI's official opinion.
Founders of successful companies don't spend their time reading about how other founders became successful. When Zuckerberg was 19 do you think he spent all his time reading interviews about billionaire startup founders? Thinking that copying their traits, following their do's and don'ts and imitating them will lead to success? No, he spent his time working on the product. That and being lucky. Some of these people lucked out more than others, and because of that they get famous, get interviewed and spiel out some B.S. about how to be successful as if everyone could do it (and that they 'made it' because of intelligence, skill, and hard work).
Absolutely correct. Zuckerberg lucked into Facebook after stealing the concept from a client. Zuck's self-esteem would be destroyed if he had this same honest evaluation of himself, so he has to tell himself that he made it due to his unusually high work ethic, intelligence, or other personal traits.
Probably the biggest thing I've learned through hard experience is that great ideas by themselves have very little value. At this point it's irrelevant whether he copied the idea from his client(s), or from Friendster or MySpace. Out of pure luck, Zuck's version appealed to the masses enough to get them to register for the site and use the contact importer. After that, skill took over - Zuck knew that if a high enough percentage of users allowed the site to spam their contacts, growth to billions of users was a mathematical certainty.
This is instructive for many startups. You don't need amazing or even original ideas. You do need to have growth features in place that, if users choose to use them, will make world domination an inevitable conclusion. Then it's just a matter of optimizing until a high enough percentage of users use that feature. If you are successful at this, you will have perpetual growth.
I totally agree. Innovation is not necessarily valued by the market. There is no shame in seeing what others are doing and copying it -- that's how the free market is supposed to work. The competition is good for everyone, and indeed, analyzing what's working and what's not for your predecessors and competitors can often be instructive in developing something that can eventually conquer the world, which Facebook assuredly did. 100% on board with execution being many orders of magnitude more important than the germinating idea.
However, the Winklevoss twins had hired Zuck and communicated their proprietary information so that they could get his execution. It is absolutely shady to get hired to develop a product, chicken out, and then implement your own version using your client's intellectual property. It's obvious that Zuck was in hot water here; if he wasn't, he wouldn't have paid out to the Winklevoss's.
It appears the lesson from Zuck is "take whatever you can and win, then deal with any potential consequences from a position of strength".
> Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.
I think that view is a little simplistic in more ways than one.
The first is that, erm, yes, there's a huge market for startup ideas. It's called the get-rich-quick-scheme industry. Sells billions of dollars worth of goods every year trying to teach people what business ideas will make them rich.
The second is that it depends what you mean by "idea." If you mean some generic one sentence pitch about some vague idea ("Uber for pets"), then, sure, it's probably not worth much.
If you have a very precise plan that includes details about go to market strategies and execution, and that is based on data only you are in possession of, it can be worth a lot of money. That's essentially what Peter Thiel talks about when he mentions good startups being based on "secrets" (the way I understood it, anyway).
That there's no liquid market for such ideas doesn't tell you much about their value.
I think when Peter Thiel talks about "secrets" in Zero to One, he's referring to truths you hold that aren't (yet) generally accepted.
> What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
> Recall the business version of our contrarian question: what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world‐changing companies yet to be started.
Yep. And presumably such secrets (or "ideas" for some value of the word "idea") are incredibly valuable.
Which, of course, is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to point it out.
That's the thing with "ideas don't matter, it's all about execution." It's either true by definition (every company has to execute something at some point to even exist), or incredibly shallow and wrong (as long as you execute something you'll get great results).
> Which, of course, is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to point it out.
It seems stupid to us, but I run into people every few weeks who "have the next big idea if only they can find a dev" but are hesitant to share more than a two-sentence pitch of fear that their coveted idea would get "stolen".
Fixed mindset vs growth mindset is still a battle for many people, especially (would be) first time non-technical founders.
"The part that was painful wasn't turning down the offer, it was the fact that after that, huge amounts of the company quit because they didn't believe in what we were doing...the whole management team was gone in about a year after that."
Making a choice that led to the entire management team leaving is tough, no doubt. Making any massively unpopular decision that leads to some of the smartest people working with you to actively flee your enterprise would be hard for anyone.
That being said, there is something to be said about how this comment was made. Because the hard part wasn't turning down the offer. It wasn't even dealing with the outcome of an unpopular choice per se -- hard to imagine these people thought "acquired by Yahoo" was the road to product success, even back then. It was dealing with the outcome of telling people they'd have to wait, possibly forever, to see their efforts rewarded (it took them 6 more years to IPO, with Zuckerberg famously devaluing the stock of early contributors along the way).
Noticing the lack of trust (possibly in both directions) _is_ a dark time, but it's hard to come to that conclusion when these things are referenced so obliquely ('people left' isn't a dark time, it's business).
"Dark time" strongly implies a subjective experience. Maybe Mark meant that was an event he personally experienced as intensely dark.
That's more or less the same situation that the TV show Silicon Valley used to stress out their founder. He's got something with potential and an offer to buy it for more money than he's ever thought about before. What do you do? Maybe go throw up in the bushes? How would it feel when you make your decision and then most of your team leaves? What if they're right and you ruined everything?
That scenario is dramatic enough when you get to watch it happen to someone else. Living through it could easily be "dark."
Please don't seek out uncharitable interpretations of what people say, when (as roymurdock has helpfully shown) the context makes it clear how unnecessary that is.
HN users sometimes feel that the rules are off when a rich and famous person is the target, but that misunderstands why we have the rules. It's not to protect the rich and famous, who (as cynics are fond of pointing out) don't need it, except of course insofar as they're human beings like anyone else. Rather, it's to protect the community from becoming a mean place that only mean people would want to be part of, and eventually not even them.
Sigh. Mark Zuckerberg is not the fellow to listen to if you want to build the future. He's only managed to re-invent the past. AOL, MySpace, FriendFeed, and probably a few others I'm forgetting.
edit: Folks are getting a bit philosophical so I'll clarify. There are better models to look up to if you want to invent the future: Bret Victor, Elon Musk, Alan Kay, Richard Feynman, etc. Each of those people did invent the future or is currently in the process of actually doing it. Study the great minds, not the great businesses and business practitioners.
But that's all the future or the present or anything is...
Iterating on old ideas. There aren't any new ideas, creativity isn't pulling things from the ether, it's looking at old things in new ways.
Geocities was an iteration on having your own webserver, myspace was the new geocities, facebook was the new myspace, $x is the new facebook ... it's just continuing on and on.
Netflix is the same on-demand video that had been available forever in pay-per-view, etc. but it was just a little bit different and a little bit better and it has destroyed several old business models because of it (cable tv, video rental stores, broadcast tv, etc.)
A car is just a nice horseless carriage which is just a more comfortable way to get around by horse which is just walking with help.
Human being are just complicated ways for strings of nucleic acid to replicate themselves.
> Human being are just complicated ways for strings of nucleic acid to replicate themselves.
And from that evolved mechanisms for learning, consciousness, culture and technology. Amazing creative power in such a "small" task. I think the drive for survival is the root cause of all the other reinforcement signals that drive the brain development, such as the need for food, sex, sleep, companionship, learning and so on. Shaped under the influence of these reward systems, the brain evolves to create the subjective, intelligent and ineffable experience we all know we have but can't properly explain.
Assuming the 'drive for survival' is a root cause misses the point. There isn't a point.
You exist because your ancestors reproduced. That's it. The traits that they had happened to result in reproduction given their life experiences. A "drive for survival" happens to be one of these traits that shows up often and for easy-enough to understand reasons, but it just happens to be one of the traits that exists in the population.
The environment shapes what reproduces, but it's messy and prone to random circumstance.
We're all the result of a billions of years old monte-carlo simulation.
How are you going to pay for all those moonshot projects that cost billions and might not make money for a decade, if ever. Google still hasn't made any money on the self-driving car. Oculus Rift?
I don't think Oculus Rift is going anywhere. They bungled that project pretty well. My question was more about your assumption about getting some kind of cash cow and then milking it to provide for "moonshots". It is one model that works but it's not the only one. Well, actually, it's debatable whether it works or not.
What you think about Oculus is irrelevant. FB has the money to see it through, along with dozens of other similar projects. Feel free to explain the other models.
State sponsored fundamental research for one. Pretty much all of the actual computing innovation was a direct result of fundamental research that was sponsored by the state either directly or indirectly. Heck, modern compilers have a direct line back to Grace Hopper working at the naval research lab.
Commercializing stuff is great and all but there is no point in pretending it is the same or equal to the kind of innovative work that consistently happens at research universities and arguably a lot of the future is invented there even if it is not commercialized.
Also what are these dozens of other projects Facebook is currently innovating on? I do see a lot of duplicated effort across google, facebook, apple, and microsoft when it comes to AI research though. This is why I don't quite get how people can argue for commercial innovation and market efficiency all in the same sentence or paragraph when there is obvious and clear evidence to the contrary.
I guess you don't understand the value behind the trillions of dollars of R&D spent over the past 50 years by tech companies like Xerox, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Google, etc
Not really. I do see a staggering amount of waste though. Duplicated effort across the board, re-invention of the same basic building blocks re-packaged and re-branded, billions spent on patent suits, billions spent on lobbying, etc. Competition in basic innovation does not make sense. In fact I'm not even sure how much of those "trillions" contributed to actual innovation. I suspect a proper analysis would reveal an extremely poor efficiency ratio and only a few keystones that could trace their history directly back to a university research projects and other state sponsored projects.
LOL, you see "a staggering amount of waste" in commercial entities and thing the way to find efficiency is to look to the government? Like government-sponsored research is going to be more efficient? That's a good one.
Basic research is exactly the kind of thing that markets are bad at doing, so it really wouldn't be surprising. Which country do you see as a model of the success of privately funded research? As far as I can see, all countries that are making significant contributions to science are spending lots of government money on it.
I don't have anything against building what people want or re-packaging what existed already in better ways. My issue was with the title. I don't doubt for a second that Zuckerberg is a great business mind but building the future requires a bit more than business acumen.
Seeing how he behaved while getting to his success i don't think he should be idealized. I would rather listen to what Elon Musk has to say about future than Mark Zuckerberg.
Why is M. Zuckerberg qualified to tell us how or to build us our future? Because he built brain dead website where people waste their precious time and lives?
Building facebook - glorified yellowpages - is somehow a sign of high knowledge or achievement these days?
Then it shall be used. And we shall be sad about that. And we are not talking about building a platform. Facebook is hardly a platform. We are talking about advertising.
He's talking about understanding facial expressions... and I'm reading his, and for some reason he just looks like he is about to cry the whole time. Not sure if it's because he is emotionally positive about the things he is talking about, or upset about something. I get like that sometimes when I speak about things that mean a lot to me, so maybe that's what's happening. It's hard to tell, because I don't know him personally.
I don't see it. I think it may be just because he's looking intently at Sam (the interviewer) and the camera is on Sam's left, and so it's filming his eyes edge-on.
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It is not just advertising. It is the click farms that facebook has deployed. If you have not spent money to advertise on facebook then please do not down vote.
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Please leave HN if you are going to post emotionally charged, baseless, unfounded, irrational thoughts. I've learned nothing from your comment and I'm worse off for having read it.
> Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?"
> Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working, and I think that...if you look at the data of the very best companies that have gotten built, I actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time. A local maximum, sorry.