[h=1]7 new things I learned from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in his interview with Y Combinator[/h]
[h=2]1. His interest in psychology led to Facebook.[/h] Mark studied psychology and computer science while in college, and was fascinated by what makes people tick.
[h=2]2. Facebook was an amalgamation of many little experiments he did at Harvard.[/h]
[h=2]4. Start with solving a problem, not with deciding that you want to build a company.[/h] Mark believes entrepreneurs should start by solving problems first instead of being determined to start a company from the get-go. He thinks a lot of top Silicon Valley founders had this same attitude.
- Terence Lee Aug 17, 2016
[h=2]1. His interest in psychology led to Facebook.[/h] Mark studied psychology and computer science while in college, and was fascinated by what makes people tick.
One of the things that you learn when you study psychology is that there are all these parts of the brain which are geared just towards understanding people, understanding language, how to communicate with each other, understanding facial expressions, emotions, processing.
Yet when I looked out at the internet in 2004, which was when I was getting started [with Facebook], you can find almost anything else that you wanted. You could find news, movies, music, reference materials, but the thing that mattered the most to people, which is other people and understanding what’s going on with them, just wasn’t there.
He realized that in order to index information about people, you needed to build tools that’ll allow them to express themselves.Yet when I looked out at the internet in 2004, which was when I was getting started [with Facebook], you can find almost anything else that you wanted. You could find news, movies, music, reference materials, but the thing that mattered the most to people, which is other people and understanding what’s going on with them, just wasn’t there.
[h=2]2. Facebook was an amalgamation of many little experiments he did at Harvard.[/h]
And there were probably 10 other things like that that I built when I was at Harvard before I actually got around to building the first version of Facebook that added a lot of these things together.
One of it was Course Match, a tool for people to see who else was taking the same classes as them.
People would just spend hours clicking through. Here are the courses that people are taking, and, wow, isn’t it interesting that this person is interested in these things? It was just text, right? There was nothing that was super interesting there, but that just struck me as people have this deep thirst to understand what’s going on with those around them.
[h=2]3. Like Google and many others, Mark Zuckerberg had no intention of turning Facebook into a full-fledged business.[/h] After launching the first version of Facebook, he chatted with friends about how someday someone would build a Facebook for the world. They never thought it would be them.
[h=2]4. Start with solving a problem, not with deciding that you want to build a company.[/h] Mark believes entrepreneurs should start by solving problems first instead of being determined to start a company from the get-go. He thinks a lot of top Silicon Valley founders had this same attitude.
I always think that this is kind of a perverse thing about Silicon Valley in a way, which is that people decide often that they want to start a company before they even decide what they want to do, and that just feels really backwards to me.
[h=2]5. Facebook’s whole management team left after Zuckerberg decided not to sell in Yahoo.[/h] Mark felt he failed to communicate his vision for the company properly to employees. As a result, many of them expected him to sell Facebook to Yahoo. In the end, the entire early management team left the company. Facebook was far from a certain success then, having only 10 million users.
For them, they joined, and being able to sell a company for a billion dollars after a couple years, that was like a home run. And it is a home run. I get that, but I think that the fact that I didn’t communicate very well about what we were trying to do caused this huge tension.
[h=2]6. There are tens of thousands of versions of Facebook running at any one time.[/h] Facebook has a testing framework that lets engineers to run experiments quickly.
At any given point in time, there’s not just one version of Facebook running in the world. There’s probably tens of thousands of versions running because engineers here have the power to try out an idea and ship it to maybe 10,000 people or 100,000 people. And then they get a readout on how that version performed compared to the baseline version of Facebook.
[h=2]7. The first version of News Feed was simple.[/h] Mark doesn’t believe in rolling out big changes to products. Even News Feed, now one of the most used products in the world, started out simple.
When we started off, we didn’t have anything like News Feed that showed you updates from what people were sharing. We just had profiles, and we found one of the big behaviors was people would just click around. They’d click on different profiles, hundreds of them, and they’d go through all their friends to see what people had changed, to see what the update was in their friend’s day.
And we learned that people were not just interested in looking up and learning about a person but also understanding the day-to-day changes. So first we made this product that just showed which of your friends had updated your profile, so that at least told you whose profile to click on. And then the first version of News Feed was really simple. It basically took the content that people were posting and put it in order on your home page.
https://www.techinasia.com/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-y-combinator
And we learned that people were not just interested in looking up and learning about a person but also understanding the day-to-day changes. So first we made this product that just showed which of your friends had updated your profile, so that at least told you whose profile to click on. And then the first version of News Feed was really simple. It basically took the content that people were posting and put it in order on your home page.
https://www.techinasia.com/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-y-combinator
