Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.

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.

I mean, we've built a lot of products that we think are good, and will help people share photos and share videos and write messages to each other. But it's really all about how people are spreading Facebook around the world in all these different countries. And that's what's so amazing about the scale that it's at today.

I actually do think you're seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that's a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what's going on with them.

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.

If you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

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.

I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems.

The main Facebook usage is so big. About 20 percent of the time people spend on their phone is on Facebook.

If you're always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

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.

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, 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.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that's always existed.

If I could snap my fingers and do one thing in science, I would get more funding for basic science. But the level of funding that needs to be done is not on the order of millions, like the cost of the Breakthrough Prizes. It's billions to tens of billions.

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.

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.

Weve all started lifelong friendships here and some of us even families. Thats why Im so grateful to this place. Thanks Harvard.

For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.

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.

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.

Facebook and Instagram are both really popular with teens, both in the U.S. and globally across the world. I think what you're starting to see is that there are all these different ways that people want to share and communicate.

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 not to build a platform; it's to be cross all of them.

I think that more flow of information, the ability to stay connected to more people makes people more effective as people. And I mean, that's true socially. It makes you have more fun, right. It feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.

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.

What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that's a problem that's probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that's actually within the range of affordability.

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

I'm trying to make the world a more open place.

I do everything on my phone as a lot of people do.

Health is certainly extremely important, and we've done a number of things at Facebook to help improve global health and work in that area, and I am excited to do more there, too. But the reality is that it's not an either-or. People need to be healthy and be able to have the Internet as a backbone to connect them to the whole economy.

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.

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.

We started off as this platform inside Facebook; and we were pretty clear from the beginning that that wasn't where it was going to end up. A lot of people saw it and asked, 'Why is Facebook trying to get all these applications inside Facebook when the web is clearly the platform?' And we actually agreed with that.

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.

Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn't do with anything else, we just have to do it.

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn't have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. 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.

Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don't do that by having a service people pay for.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

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.

We're a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones - apart from the iPhone - can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we'd only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn't do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into 'Facebook phones.' That's what Facebook Home is.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I'm generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we're providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we're doing so well on so many of these things. I think it's important to have gratitude for that.

By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent.

The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.

Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.

I just want to make sure when I have kids, I can spend time with them. That's the whole point.

One of the things that we're trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren't all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.

It's against all of our policies for an application to ever share information with advertisers.

Mobile is a lot closer to TV than it is to desktop.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn't smooth. You'll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don't believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don't give up.

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.

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

When most people ask about a business growing, what they really mean is growing revenue, not just growing the number of people using a service. Traditional businesses would view people using your service that you don't make money from as a cost.

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.

Connectivity just can't be a privilege for people in the richest countries. We believe that connecting everyone in the world is one of the great challenges of our generation, and that's why we are happy to play whatever small part in that that we can.

Move fast with stable infrastructure.

Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.

We're running the company to serve more people.

There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

I feel like the thing we can do is celebrate people doing great work and create more cultural momentum and awareness that this is an important thing in the world. So when the next economic crisis hits and people are talking about where to cut from the budget, science isn't the thing.

I think what we've found is that when you can use products with your friends and your family and the people you care about, they tend to be more engaging. I think that we're really going to see this huge shift where a lot of industry is and products are just going to be remade to be social.

There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don't usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.

By giving people the power to share were making the world more transparent.

I think as a company if you can get those 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.

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.

Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we're continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we've taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.

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.

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.

People at Facebook are fairly used to the press being nice to us or not nice to us.

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

I like making things. I don't like getting my picture taken.

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.'

It's, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we've had some very serious ups and downs.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you're not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

The only meat I eat is from animals I've killed myself.

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.

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 believe we have to nip Ebola in the bud before it spreads through Africa and to other countries.

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.

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.

Hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

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.

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?'

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.

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.

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.

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.